What If? Children of the Atom
by Of Kurtz
Summary: AU fic. Xavier and Magneto never existed, never exposed the world to the reality of genetic mutation, and never drew their respective battle lines. Alone and without guidance, how will the children of the atom survive?
1. Chapter 1

So, since I've been suffering from such awful writer's block with all of my other "serious" works, I decided to venture back into the world of fanfiction. All involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended – fanfiction just makes for wonderful literary exercise.

**As previously stated, this is an AU fic, fashioned in the same vein as Marvel's What If? series. Here, our X-Men are the first generation of mutants – there is no Magneto, no Xavier; Rogue was never adopted by Mystique and Cyclops was never manipulated by Sinister, etc. The vast majority of society has no knowledge of genetic mutation, including those who experience it.** For me, is just a sort of way to explore (a bit more realistically than in the comics) what would have happened to some of our favorite characters if they had been on their own from the start. My initial relationship with continuity is going to be a loose one before I head out on my own – it's no fun rehashing events/conversations that you can read in the comics.

I'm very tentatively starting this fic out with a T rating, though that is more than likely to change to M in the future due to adult themes. If anyone feels uncomfortable with this initial rating after reading this chapter, I'm more than happy to bump it up.

Happy reading!

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><p>"Stefan?"<p>

That little breath of air, barely a whisper, tears from his throat and cuts the awful silence that presses down on the courtyard, the moon-kissed cobblestones of the street. They look like dead fish, those little children, floating in the fountain water, wrapped in their own sopping clothes. Blood blackened water breaks on their pale, vacant faces, on open, pallid hands that bob in the gentle current contained within the fountain's concrete basin.

"Stefan?" He's so heavy, all of a sudden, so heavy that Kurt can hardly hold him, and they sink to the ground together. Like a heavy flower on a broken stem Stefan's head rolls bonelessly to rest on Kurt's shoulder, his dark eyes full of surprise and even fear, maybe, but empty of light. There's almost no blood, just a little trickle that escapes Stefan's nose, pattering down to those smooth stones as Kurt sinks with him, cradling in one hand the neck that had – no, no, he hadn't meant it; Stefan had always been so fragile –

_"Stefan?" As much as Kurt doesn't want to admit it, his brother has grown increasingly strange over the past few months – distant, nervous. Stefan's fingernails are bit to bleeding and tense smiles are quick to cut his features when he does make public appearances, which are becoming increasingly rare - he laughs too long and too loud or broods, alone, indefinitely. Regulated to the caravan during the lighted hours, Kurt finds himself watching too much TV, and when the children start disappearing he tells himself that Stefan would never, could never . . ._

_ Yet, when, hours after the final show was spent, Stefan still hadn't returned home, Kurt had crept into the sleeping village with a nervous trepidation only outweighed by fraternal fear. Now, looking at the spouting water that haloes his brother's lank figure, a limp body clutched to the young man's heaving breast, Kurt can only selfishly wish he had not come looking for him, after all._

_ "What are you doing?" But he can see well enough, despite the feeble light from the smattering of streetlights._

_ Stefan looks up slowly, his eyes wide, his mouth fractured into a rictus grin, lips dribbling spittle. "I'm doing baptisms, Kurt." He gestures to the bodies – how did he get so many here, without someone seeing? – to the red lines that break open their throats like obscene grins. "They needed saving, Kurt. They had bad things in them. Bad things that needed cutting out." With the red-drenched knife in his left hand he traces graceful characters into the night sky. Kurt raises his hands._

_ "Stefan . . ." His voice breaks, and he takes a cautious step forward. "You're . . . you're sick. You need help. Put down the knife and—"_

_ "No, no, Kurt. The sickness is gone now. I cut it all out. I—"_

_ Not all the bodies are in the fountain, Kurt sees too late – there are a few draped around its periphery, and Stefan has not been thorough in his gristly work. A little hand, a shoulder shift from where they rest against the fountain's lip; there's a little, sobbing sigh that might have been the wind, somewhere better. Kurt hopes for a brief instant that Stefan doesn't notice, but fate - with a startled, enraged shout, the limp body in Stefan's arms drops with a cataclysmic splash as Stefan turns and Kurt leaps; in two steps he feels the warmth of his brother's neck in his hands-_

"Nein, nein . . ." A dream, surely. The night is clear but there's a fog, somehow; the lights from the sparse streetlights run into together in a yellow smear. He can feel the cold crispness of the breeze, the smoothness of the stones under his knees but they seem otherworldly – his own heart is moving too slowly for him to be real, the sound of it filling his ears in a metronome, accompanied only by his ragged breathing and the clouds of smoke the cold air steals from his body. His vision feels crushed, haloed in darkness. A dream, he thinks, this sort of numbness can't be possible except for in a nightmare. And the body in his arms – impossibly small, impossibly still, cooling and stiffening even as it leaches the warmth from Kurt's own – can't possibly be that of a murderer. There's no evil in those dark eyes that reflect the moonlight, like pools of dark water; the limp hands, smudged with blood, had never before this night been cruel. So Kurt buries his face into his brother's shirt (it stinking of the drying blood of children), waiting to awaken with the pensive, drugged tension of a soldier waiting for a call to arms.

A whimper breaks him from his reverie. He looks up with tired eyes at the little girl who had lived, who had moved at such a terrible moment. In a somnambulist torpor he reaches out to her as if in shared grief, "Mädchen . . ."

Her pale, watery eyes meet his. Her small lips tremble.

And she screams.

It fractures the silence like a crack of lightning. She screams, and the windows of the looming houses surrounding them promptly flicker to life with glowing light. There are so many people, suddenly, bedraggled and half-dressed, pouring into the street, their hair in hurricanes and feet bare or quickly booted, wrapped in blankets or improper coats. The flood of them fills the previously silent street with a cacophony of shouts and murmurs.

"Was ist passiert?"

"Was ist das?"

Startled gasps and screams mingle with the girl's ambulatory shriek as the unkempt people gather, and charge as one towards the sound.

"Die Kinder!" A woman's tortured howl cuts above the other wails of grief and shock. "Mein Gott, die Kinder! Er hat die Kinder getötet!"

As the crowd approaches him Kurt stands, dragging his brother's body up with him, his vision distorted by anguished tears. "Bitte, bitte, mein Bruder . . ."

"Dämon!"

A thunder crack, and a sharp pain slices Kurt's cheek, startling a tear from his eye. Raising one hand he brushes his face absently, looks at his fingers. Blood.

"Monster!"

A second, sharp blast, and the face of one of the fountain's gargoyles beside him explodes into concrete vapor.

"Töten Sie es!"

Kurt drops his brother's body, and runs.

* * *

><p><em> Hi, <em>_Kitty_ | Sign Out | Help

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**BlacKat71 Having some weird symptoms . . . am I cracking up?**

I've been having really bad migraines for the past couple of weeks, so bad that I can't do anything but lay around and want to die. But the past couple of days,

and I know this sounds crazy, but . . . I think I've been walking through things. Like walls and stuff. I'll go to sleep in my room and wake up in the basement. Is

this normal? I'm only 14 and I've just started my girly stuff. Am I going crazy? What should I do?

3 hours ago Report Abuse

** Additional Details**

I don't feel like I can talk to my parents, they've been fighting a lot. Please help!

**Harry M.**

**Best Answer - Chosen by Asker**

BlacKat, it sounds like you might be having some serious neurological problems if you're having headaches with visual hallucinations (walking through walls.) As

a doctor, I would recommend you make an appointment with your family doctor immediately. I don't want to scare you, but this could by symptomatic of a

serious medical condition.

2 hours ago Report Abuse

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** Other Answers (2)**

**Bibbityfob**

Hey Blackkat! I think maybe your sleepwalking, Ive been doing it since I was in a kid and its nothing to worry about, just try locking your door at night so you

cant go anywhere which is what I do. My doctor told me I would grow out of it but no luck yet. Your headaches might be from stress because of your parents. I

hope stuff gets better for you!

2 hours ago Report Abuse

**Jerzyboi**

Wlakin thru walks would be effin cool

3 hours ago Report Abuse

* * *

><p>The world, to him, has long since become a dark, tactile place. The bandages over his eyes have been in place for years – though not the same ones, of course; he changes them with obsessive regularity, and while he does, he wonders what his eyes must look like – lids smooshed, eyelashes stunted, the skin around them white, like the negative of a thief's mask – and maybe betraying a little crimson light around the edges. It was hard, at first, to resist the urge to open them, and he had blown holes into the walls of enough foster homes that he'd become the modern equivalent of a leper – cast out from even the outcasts. Destructive, delinquent, depressed, disabled. Why shouldn't he set fires, punch holes, they commiserated, as family after family packed his suitcases and sent him somewhere where he couldn't bother them any more. Now it's easy – it is as if the skin of his eyes and the skin of his cheeks have simply grown together.<p>

So he sits and waits for attack in his dark corner of the crowded world, blind-stick in hand, which he uses to thrash the kids who come close to him with their stifled giggles and outstretched hands, trying to play tricks. They want to snatch his bandages off – they think he has wounds, or maybe terrible scars, and he's been tempted more than once to let them see what he's hiding. He can't, of course . . . no, it's safer to sit and wait, to be wary for every potential attack; there are too many kids that are miserable and mean, with tripping feet and pushing hands even the benevolent ones regularly change the terrain with their toys and games, and he is always stumbling and falling . . .

"Hey."

"Hey." She won't let him touch her face so he doesn't know what she looks like, but he knows her smell well enough – the chalky smell of deodorant and the false flowers of shampoo masking the ever-present odor of Thunderbird wine. He had asked her about it one time and she had laughed, said, "it's a southern thang," in that slow, sad drawl of hers. She touches his hands sometimes but he doesn't know her that way either – she wears gloves, slippery smooth and impersonal.

"How come you're so far north, then?" He had asked her once.

"Ah thought maybe it'd be differn't."

"What did you think?"

Tartly, "Ah'm stuck here, ain't Ah?"

He doesn't like her – she's too loud and brash and rude and more often than not just drunk enough to be pissed off at the world, and people have a bad habit of passing out while she's around. She fights, she wins. He sits and waits for attack, and loses more often than not.

But she's different today, and not just because she smells like Jack Daniels (must have come across a hidden stash of some other kid's money, or maybe she lifted a wallet from a passerby); she _feels_ different. He hasn't always been in the black exile of blindness so he knows colors, and, to him, sometimes people feel like floating dyes. Mostly, she's a hot, molten red that blackens at the edges with despair – he sees too much of himself in that, and maybe that's why they don't get along. Today, though, she feels maybe blue, a calm color as she touches his shoulder with those gloves that squeak when her fingers curl.

"Ah'm leavin'."

"You eighteen yet?"

She laughs. Her laughing never sounds particularly joyful. "You first." Ah, eighteen, eighteen, the age of emancipation . . .

"Where are you going?"

"Away." Of course, she can see; she's young, she can dream – though her dreaming doesn't sound particularly joyful either. "Ah dunno, hop a bus somewhere – Ah've got some cash. Maybe head back home." Not _home_ home, but he knows what she's talking about – back to the sultry heat and the salty air of the Gulf of Mexico, the souse of every southern girl's heart. "You want to come?"

He's touched, a little. "I've only got a few months before the state turns me out." He shrugs sadly, feels his lower lip tremble a little, pulls it into a tight grimace to make it stop. "Guess I should get all the free meals I can until then."

"Ah'll send you—" _A postcard_, he finishes mentally even as she breaks off, embarrassed. He laughs.

* * *

><p>They should paint this place another color. Perhaps with white they are trying to evoke a feeling of emptiness – peace, calm, tranquility, cleanliness. But white isn't the absence of all things, after all, but the combination of them—it is the white spear of light that pierces the prism to be divided into all the hues of the rainbow. So it comes to no surprise that in this place of so much whiteness she is everything – she is Gunter down the hall, who likes comic books<p>

_(but only the Flash and Green Lantern, and mom brought Batman, of course, she always brings Batman even though I tell her EVERY TIME that I don't even LIKE Batman but it always makes her so upset I shouldn't be so mean, I shouldn't be so awful she's doing her best)_

who thinks that the fillings in his teeth are transmitters for a more advanced time and that he can thus tell the future, though this future seems completely restricted to the area of horse races (where he is almost always wrong) and post-apocalyptic futures (where his expertise is still pending confirmation.) Here, in this place of white pillow-softness, she is Annette in the room next door, no education beyond the basics, no family to speak of, whose mind is a great white void of overstimulation through which coherent thoughts only dubiously cross, and then only in vague questions. Here she is Doris, lowest third of her class and worried that she'll be alone forever, who smothered her little baby boy to death with more white softness because she was afraid that he needed something she couldn't bear to give, and Jean finds her the most disturbing because Doris isn't supposed to be crazy at all; she's one of the sane ones, in her crisp white uniform and white, rubber-soled shoes. Even the smell of her is white, some store-bought perfume without a brand, one that comes out of a plastic bottle in a spritz, rather than from glass carafe in a cloud.

"Are you ready to be good, Jeanie?" White softness, white softness, and dust motes swirl in the light from the single barred window like fairy dust. Jean raises her head from the padded floor with a smile that causes Doris's to wither. The small action exhausts Jean; all her limbs are made of lead and she's leaking drool like an infant, like the infant that Doris smothered, like poor Paul in C-Wing

_(two kids and an elderly mother MA in Accounting from the University of Texas kicked in the head by a horse on the stupid vacation the wife nagged endlessly for that bitch should be here, not me, why can't I THINK, why can't I THINK)_

who, when not in cacophonies of aimless rage, leaks equally aimless sorrow from all of his orifices. And despite how much Doris loathes touching her patients

_(catching, crazy might be catching)_

she pets Jean's head tentatively, as if stroking a sleeping tiger, waiting for it to snap up and bite.

Jean struggles to string her thoughts together, and through the drug haze, it's like trying to arrange two-ton boulders into a line. "No." Her mouth is only connected to her brain through the most tenuous of tendrils, her tongue a dead, swollen creature nesting in the dry cavern of her throat; she floats, half-connected to her own flesh, but still feels Doris's anger and slight sorrow at the answer.

"Why not, honey? You have such beautiful hair."

Tyler the janitor thinks so too. The lush redness of her hair is always impossibly emphasized in his mind as thinks about ruining her creatively, thoroughly, eternally. She can feel him now, hear the gentle whish-whish of his mop, but he's thinking about Lori, who's just here because she's feeling a little "down" and hasn't told them about all those fires that she started.

"Lori is just hear for an evaluation, Jeanie, she hasn't started any fires."

Jean blinks sullenly; she's gone and done it again. Doris's face has that pinched look it gets whenever someone starts displaying visible signs of crazy – when they're quiet she can think of them as little broken things in need of glue; when they're vocal about it, she thinks they're being difficult.

"I don't think you're being difficult, Jeanie. I just want to know why you hurt yourself. I can't let you out of here if you keep hurting yourself."

Because, she says silently as she twists on the floor, kicking her foot out against the bare mattress (no sheets for hanging), turning away from that sour-grape face in a barrel roll and her elbows are beginning to get stiff from her arms' forced, awkward expression of self-love

_(Ian, his name was Ian and it must have happened because I spend so much time here, I swear to God its catching like the flu, brain-flu, brain-fever, like in all those Victorian stories)_

because in the moment of real, true pain, agonizing pain, like when you're shot

(_Billy Room 14A shot in the hip in the war sees it every night sees the face of all of those goddamn gooks fall like blades of grass under a lawnmower and the sound of the machinegun rattle is frighteningly similar)_

like when you're burning

_(Lori Emerson with white scar tissue mottling every slender finger if they ask it's from a grease fire, a grease fire because I work in a kitchen yes and I'll never use gasoline again nearly burned off all my)_

like when you tear your hair out in great chunks from the roots, everything else goes away. For a moment, when endorphins begin to flood your blood in the realization of attack, of injury, there's a moment of no pain, no noise, no color, nothing else in the world but you.

White hot silence.

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><p>I always love hearing from readers – comments and criticism are welcome!<p>

German translations (I've studied German for about two years now, so I'm going to be terribly embarrassed if I got any of these wrong):

Mädchen - Girl

Was ist passiert? – What happened?

Was ist das? – What is that?

Die Kinder! – The children!

Mein Gott, die Kinder! Er hat die Kinder getötet! – My God, the children! He's killed the children!

Bitte, bitte, mein Bruder – Please, please, my brother

Dämon! – Demon!

Monster! – Monster! (Self explanatory, no?)

Töten Sie es! – Kill it!


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: All involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended - I am most definitely not making any money off of this, as my bank account proves. I just like playing with the toys.

Thanks to those who reviewed last chapter! Here we venture even further away from continuity, but, as I said before, this is most definitely AU. It should be understood that in the second passage, the characters are speaking in Russian, and the third they're speaking in Arabic. I would put in some other identifying factor around the text, but I think it interrupts the flow (and this website doesn't allow for many inserted symbols anyways.) Anyways, I hope everyone enjoys!

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><p>Chapter Two<p>

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><p>It's always gray, down at the docks – or, at least, it seems that way to Val Cooper. No matter the weather in the rest of the city, the sky by the river always seems to be the same slate gray color as the tarmac, and the salt-bitter air always feels a few degrees colder. Without that, the place might be whimsical – a child's playground with boxcars stacked like Lego bricks, the stilted bodies of almost delicate-looking cranes perched above the maze, moving with incredible, mechanical grace as they unload cargo from ships that seem more to lumber through the gunmetal water than to float.<p>

Whimsical, yes . . . especially since the whirling police lights add to it a kaleidoscopic effect, reflecting from the smooth white and blue metal of the police cars' finish, that of the single red fire truck, whose siren still goes in a lamenting whine.

"Someone shut that shit off, will you?"

_So maybe the gray sky is a good thing_, she muses as she turns the collar of her wool jacket up against the chill. _It should never be sunny on a day like this._

"I thought all you Interpol guys were supposed to be desk jockeys." It comes out a lot . . . _bitchier _than Val had intended, and no sooner do the words escape her lips than she starts flipping through her mental catalog of her experience and qualifications, pulling out relevant files – MA in Psychology, 90% case clearance rate - ready for the expected retort of, "Well, aren't you a little young to be heading an FBI task force?"

It never comes. Instead, a slow, handsome smile creeps across Sean Cassidy's face, and he replies in that impossibly sexy Irish lilt, "Ah, well, you know, we desk jockeys like to get out and see what we're working with every once in a while."

It doesn't come out like that. It comes out as "' Ahweel yoknow we deskjockeys loiket'getawtan 'see whetwe'reworkin'wit' eryonce inawhoile," and Val spends a good thirty seconds mentally translating the words into understandable English. While her forebrain is tackling this task, the lesser parts of her have the opportunity to marvel that he certainly doesn't _look _like he spends much time behind a desk, not with the way that cracked leather jacket falls against his arms, his chest, his shoulders . . . and that he's probably the first person she's ever met with naturally golden hair, or "strawberry blonde", as the philistines might say . . .

"Ms. Cooper?" They're crossing the broad gulf of the concrete quay, headed towards the labyrinth of boxcars stacked two and three high - where all the action is, where she had purposely parked far from. In her relatively short experience as an FBI agent, she had learned that locals are more forthcoming if you don't bust into their crime scenes, lights flashing and guns poised, like a B-movie supercop. Plus, despite exposing them to that bracing wind, the opportunity to size up her international accomplice (she'd referred to him as her sidekick to her co-workers back at the station, before she'd actually met him) was not one to pass up . . . "Ms. Cooper?"

He's staring at her with those baby blues, undoubtedly because of _her _staring, and she blushes, clears her throat and opens her mouth . . . and produces nothing. Blood begins creeping up towards her scalp the longer her lips are parted. _Say something! _"So they pulled the boat in off the coast?"

_What is wrong with me? _She seizes on that gentle prompt as if it's a lifeline, pushing her bottle-blonde hair out of her face with the kind of laugh that makes her think she might be a little too young for this, after all. "Ah, yes. It was a drifter about thirty miles out, well outside of territorial waters. The ship is registered to a Hellfire Shipping Service – it sounded like the worst kind of dummy company, so I sent out a few of my guys to check out the registered address for the headquarters. Turns out it's a drycleaners in China Town." Sean Cassidy nods soberly. "So far, no tag on who the merchandise was going to be delivered to."

"Where's the crew?"

"Abandoned ship, apparently. The place was a ghost town when the coast guard checked it out. God only knows how long it's been at sea – it was towed in late yesterday afternoon, and has been sitting on the dock since. The locals called us in this morning." Their pace slows as they approach the perimeter of the scene. Though the area is thick with black-clad police officers and choked with police cars, invariably, a few dockworkers in yellow safety vests and hard hats float at the fringes, their heads cocked in curiosity and speculation. "They had to wait on a warrant to search the vessel before they could start unloading the cargo onto the dock. So far, the vast majority of the cache seems to be medical equipment, but a few cars have what looks to be government-grade computers inside, though none of them have any proper agency tags on them."

"What made 'em suspect human traffickin'?"

"The smell. One of the coast guard guys said he smelled something like burning meat near one of the boxcars. The customs seal on the car had been broken too, so he got curious and opened her up. Guy's in the emergency room now. Apparently he vomited so much from the sight of the scene he dehydrated himself pretty seriously."

"Grand." They are approaching the cordoned-off area, and Sean ducks under the yellow tape, holding it up for her to pass beneath; he's eyeing her warily. "Have ye ever had a human trafficking case before?"

Val steels. "I worked homicide on a state level for five years before I was assigned to this task force, Agent Cassidy. I think I can handle myself –"

"Not sayin' ye can't." He raises his hands in a surrendering gesture. "But ye may want t' take a deep breath a'fore they open up that box."

Except for the uniformed thunderstorm surrounding it, this boxcar looks no different than any of the other dozens they've passed – regular in shape and size, tired in color, rust-spotted. The officers around it look sick or nervous, and immediately Val can smell it – the charred fetor of a good campfire or a bad barbeque, along with the bitter stink of scorched metal and burned blood.

"And they said there was a survivor?" Cassidy's voice reflects her mental disbelief perfectly.

"Yeah, they took the guy to the county general. Said he was in shock and dehydrated, but otherwise he seems physically fine." Val, despite herself, takes a deep breath. "Okay, open her up."

The pale officer beside the door (looking like he just started shaving a week or two ago) snaps to attention, and throws back the metal clasps holding the door shut. The boxcar comes open with a metal scream.

Val Cooper turns and makes it all of four steps before she narrowly avoids throwing up on her shoes.

* * *

><p>The engine roars; rooster tails of mud are slung from the wildly spinning tires into the damp mist of the morning air. It's not a truck that looks like it can take much punishment – the wheel wells are rust stained, paint missing in great scratches and chips from the countless buckles and dents in the body (as if its been gnawed on by some massive dog); the whirr of the tires and labor of the engine climax into a metallic scream before his foot eases off the gas. The truck, in apparent relief, slouches back in the slick black mire of its own ragged tracks.<p>

"It's still there, Piotr." Illyana, perched on the bare scalp of a tree stump ten meters away, yawns lethargically into one small hand as Piotr sticks his head out of the open window, looks over his shoulder. Behind the wretched truck, tethered by a thick chain to its axle, a massive tree stump clings stubbornly to the Earth.

"Chyort voz'mi." He mutters, throws the truck back into gear, and hits the gas once more. The truck jumps forward; the chain tightens into the tension of a guitar string. Once again the toils of labor give way to tinny screams of pain and indignation as the stump remains anchored in place, while the truck seems to be pulling against its own skeleton – the damp air fills with the acrid stench of burning rubber. Piotr cuts the engine. Exiting the cab with a slam of the door, he trudges through the mire and sits down heavily beside his little sister.

He's been doing this since dawn, and has only succeeding in pulling three stumps from a field pockmarked with them.

Illyana tips her bag of gummy candies towards the older boy; he takes it, picks one candy out delicately and they sit for a moment, chewing silently.

"You should just do that thing."

"What thing?"

"You know, that thing where you turn into the big metal guy." With sudden energy Illyana springs into a stand, her boots sinking a good centimeter into the water saturated earth. Her wheat-blonde hair bounces against the back of her threadbare jacket. Arms curling up towards her head in a mock-wrestler pose, she turns, beams at him. "I bet you could just pull those tree stumps out of the ground if you turned into him."

"I can't do that any more, Snowflake."

"Why _not? _It's stupid to sit here and do it this way if you could do it another way that's faster and_ better_." Her child-face screws up in indignation as she snatches her bag of candies back, which Piotr had been rooting through with interest. "You can't have any more unless you do it."

"Snowflake, it's . . . I can't explain it. It's wrong that I can do that. It . . . it isn't _natural_. And if people saw—"

"But you saved me that one time, remember? When Papa was driving the tractor and he didn't see me and you turned into the big metal guy and you saved me! That wasn't wrong, was it?"

"Of course not –"

"And there's nobody here!" She flings open her arms and whirls in a sliding pirouette in the mud, and Piotr has to admit that it is indeed a quiet morning, even for Siberia. Those few tourists who venture so far out into the wilderness – for hiking, for camping, to get the real Russian "experience" – have long since retired back to their homelands. The growing season is over, the harvest season soon to begin with worrying results – there has been so much rain this year, and the acres of farmland to Piotr's back are marred with too many plants whose leaves have withered like burned paper, whose stalks hunch, browned and wizened, like old men. The roads have likewise become little more than black oil slicks, the virescent landscape spotted with the little mirrors of pooled water. The horizon is open before them, empty, perspective only stolen away by the sparse trees that mark the boundary of Piotr's destructive efforts. He had just finished cutting down the trees the day before, and though the field is clean of felled logs, many of the trees' dismembered branches and scattered leaves remain. If not for a trill of a single bird hidden somewhere in the trees, they might have been the only living creatures on Earth.

"Come on." A knowing smile sidles across the white planes of Illyana's face and she crosses her arms, tips her head. "Or maybe you can't do it."

"Illyana, I am not going to play this game with you." But he can't help but grin at his much younger sister as she tramps through the wet grass and sucking mud to the stubborn stump, appraising it seriously, fists on her hips.

"I don't know. It's a pretty big stump. It would take someone really big and strong to pull it." He knows what she's doing, hiding her little grin behind her tightly fastened lips as her eyes flit from the mangled wood to him. "You probably couldn't do it even if you wanted to. I mean, you're strong, but I don't think you're _that_ strong . . ."

So it gives him an excuse. Because despite his parents' gimlet-eyed warnings ("You mustn't do that any longer, Piotr. If someone were to find out it might be dangerous for you. People might try and take advantage of a . . . a special person like you.") the rescue of his little sister had not been the end-all, be-all of his career as an impossibility of nature. If he was being honest, he would admit that the day before, alone, after a few hours of dragging tree trunks behind the weary, rattling truck, he had taken to the task himself, toting the massive trunks, one under each arm, as if they were nothing more than sticks to be stacked. He knows that his parents suspect when the work is done too quickly, when the tools don't need to be replaced as often as they should. At first they were fire-eyed about his insolence, as much, he suspects, out of their own fear of what he was becoming as their fear that someone would discover his _talents_. After a while, though, they had apparently realized that this change has made him no less of a careful and thoughtful boy. Which is why, Piotr guesses, he is here, clearing a field alone with only a single truck as assistance, working a field that is supposed to be ready for sowing in a few short weeks, while his father's other hired hands tend plots miles away, ones already clearly weather-spoiled.

His father is nothing if not pragmatic. And it is not as though Piotr resents the burden, the opportunity. There is no comparison with that feeling of power when he changes, how the world somehow grows more distant, more dim, yet he himself somehow more real within it. How the everyday uncertainties of his father's poor health and their struggling farm, of ever-depleting finances and crop blights become secondary to the immensity of the power he contains within the muscles of his body, and unbreakable substance of his chrome-colored skin. Things are simple when he changes – the world is divided in the twin spheres of order and chaos, and he is a demigod in both creation and destruction alike.

"I am afraid I cannot allow you to tarnish my good name, Snowflake," he says with a wink and a smile as he stands and removes his belt, his jacket, his tired boots and thick wool socks. Mud squelches between his toes, but there's no money to replace shoes dismembered by huge steel toes.

It washes over him as he approaches that insolent stump – energy that is somehow hot and cold, electric and molten, and he sees rather than feels his clothes begin to bulge against their seams.

"Oh, wow." With a fleeting hand Illyana reaches out and brushes his arm, then presses her hand against the cool metal – he can hardly feel it, as if the touch is from a ghost in a dream. "Wow." And for a moment he feels nothing but a devastating love for his little sister, who doesn't ask questions that he can't answer or goggle with apprehension; she just grins, her eyes gleaming with wonder.

"Give me some room to work, Snowflake," he says as he begins dramatically rolling up his sleeves. As she scampers away in self-preservative delight he buries his hands in the sides of the stump. The wood might as well be made of cake batter.

"Let us see what this stump is really made of." And he pulls. It comes up so easily he stumbles back a step or two in overexertion, as the roots anchoring the stump in place snap like strands of hair.

He turns and grins at her, holding up the wood and immense mound of soil the broken roots still clutch. "See? That was not so tough." But she's not grinning back. Instead, she looks almost comically speculative, her little face scrunched in deliberation.

"Well . . . I don't know. Seems to me like the truck probably loosened that one for you. Now that stump over there really looks like a tough one—"

* * *

><p>"This is unacceptable."<p>

The thin thoroughfares between the boxy, sand-and-white colored buildings are choked with exhaust, with cigarette smoke and never ending tides of pushing people, who snake around the prattling cars and smoke-belching buses with an deft, if not insane, grace. Despite the constant whining horns and incessant chatter, there's a musical quality to the market place, if only a figurative one – a lyrical element to the people who skitter across the street and duck into and out of buildings, and meld just as quickly into a the cacophony of chaos just as easily as a thread melds into the greater picture of a tapestry. There are beggars and there is rubble, the trash of a thousand passers by; there is the shade of green trees that spring from the middle of the sidewalks; there are stands with figs and oranges and baskets heaped with the rugged oranges, yellows and reds of spice, boxes of brass trinkets and perfumes. There are burqas and colorful headscarves as often as there are blue jeans.

Perhaps its because of this gentle if feverish flow that the tourists are so noticeable – while everyone else rushes they wander in their too short-shorts and flip flops, their skin either starved of sunlight or too deeply loved by it. They float, eyes up, while the natives break from behind them like a stream from behind a stone; their mouths are often turned in distaste at the smoke and the clamor, or gaping like men who have awoken from dreams of darkness into a colorful world. Many of them are very fat.

"Stop complaining, Ororo."

It's not a particularly clever trick. Their targets are almost exclusively young girls, especially those in groups. Disarming, unassuming, lovely dark Fatima will dart forward and grab a tourist girl's pale hand with a beaming smile that infects her sable eyes as she purrs in broken English: "You're so beautiful! Something to match your beauty! What is your name?" And despite the girl's weak protests Fatima will begin to stipple the girl's wrist with henna, saying, "A friendship bracelet! A beautiful gift for a beautiful girl!"

Sometimes they snatch their hands away and move on with a dark glower, but only rarely. Far more often, the girl's friends will stand around and giggle in awe or will ask for a tattoo themselves; or the girl's mother will coo with wonder while her father calculates the expected price of every honey-brown drop. Despite the simplicity of the trick Ororo has to admit that Fatima is rather good – for the most part the people look bewildered, as if snared in some spider's nest, hypnotized by the geometric lines and whimsical swirls that materialize along their flesh with the woman's graceful efforts, a blueprint born from paste squeezed out of a plastic bag.

The fun always ends too quickly. The price demanded is always exorbitant, and will almost always provoke one of two reactions - distracted confusion or open annoyance, often tinged with wrath. Voices will inevitably rise, as these tourists always seem to be incapable of doing anything without it being an event. Fatima, as beautiful as she is, turns ugly with a quickness and dexterity that would be stunning if it weren't practiced, and more often than not her opponents match her flinty stare, the acid dripping in her voice. Inevitably on this busy street between the sights and the hotel blocks, other tourists will begin to slow, to stop, to watch, as if the conflict is a play put on for their amusement.

"I'm better than this."

The actual theft takes no more than a few seconds. Ororo will wander through the crowd, taking everything: jewellery, spectacles, wallets and watches, slipping them from the fixated tourists with almost lazy grace. Purse lips are parted and her deft fingers feel for the most precious of contents – cell phones, credit cards, bundles of cash and cameras. Even those smart enough to not carry handbags or wallets on these thieving streets fall just as quickly – those who carry their money in purses around their necks never notice when, strings cut, the bundles of cash fall between their feet; those with backpacks and luggage are even less aware of greedy, agile fingers, and Ororo has more than once sauntered off with a laptop concealed between her thighs.

Eventually, Fatima will begrudgingly agree on a much lower price, and the wronged party will stride off, feeling victorious. The crowd of onlookers will disperse, none the wiser; eventually, when they realize they've been robbed, none will think of the arguing Arabic woman and the annoyed tourist. They'll return to their restaurants or accuse their hotel managers, etcetera, etcetera . . .

And on it goes, dozens of times a day, day after day. Unacceptable.

Fatima cocks her head from where she's discreetly counting the bills lined up in her little purse. "What are you talking about? Our take was good today."

Ororo tries very hard not to look at the other woman with a tired expression. "Fatima, I stole a Van Gogh from the Cairo museum not two months ago. Before that, thirteen priceless artifacts from private collectors. But instead of being rewarded, here I stand on the streets, picking pockets and palming watches. I have not done this since I was eight years old!"

Fatima laughs bitterly, her dark eyes flashing. "You should be happy that you are even allowed to steal, instead of being forced into a marriage to one of those disgusting slobs. Instead of being sold off to the highest bidder like a _goat_." Dusk is coming. Already tourists - some in suits - are stumbling wetly, loudly, into the streets.

"El-Gibar . . ." Ororo struggles for a moment as she watches one young man, with a group of his kin, fall to the ground with a shouted, slurred curse. "He is just doing what he thinks is best." The conjecture is not pronounced with much conviction, but the hard glint in Fatima's eyes fades.

"I know. I suppose it is better than being thrown out on the street when I get too old, when my hands get to crippled by arthritis to paint henna or steal purses." Her hands curl up into grotesque, exaggerated claws, but there's no real humor in the gesture. Ororo wants to protest that Achmed would never do such a thing (he gave Ororo everything, after all, took her in when no one else would), but the words never find their way up out of her throat. Fatima continues with disdain, "It's better than being a beggar or a prostitute. Ah, to be a female orphan! No father to give you a dowry, no brothers to support you when no man will marry you. You have a last name, at least, Ms. _Munroe._"

The word is said with more than a hint of disdain. Ororo smiles sadly. "Honestly, I have been planning on leaving myself. You should come with me to Kenya. Maybe-"

"For what? I am already going far from home soon, to a place where I don't speak the language. At least people are rich there. At least I might have nice clothes and a pretty house, if I am lucky. What does Kenya promise me? Poverty and violence. I have had plenty of that in my life, thank you. And you-" She laughs, though not unkindly, "And you have been saying that you will go to Kenya, _your mother's home,_ since you were ten years old. And yet here you are – the fierce, independent African girl wearing a headscarf, just like the rest of us. You are _tame. _I never would have thought it, considering what you are._"_

Ororo touches the bright orange scarf that hides her silver hair from prying eyes, eyes narrowed, lips downturned. She is remembering why Fatima reminds her as often of a black fly as a butterfly. "I only wear this scarf because a thief can't afford to have identifying characteristics, " her blood has become molten in her body, though her voice has filled with ice, "and what do you mean, 'what I am'?"

"Ah, well, you seem to think that no one knows you are special. That we don't know you did something to those security systems so you could steal that painting, those trinkets with no one the wiser." Fatima shrugs. "El-Gibar thinks you are a jinn – he is afraid of you, and that's why he keeps you in the streets. I think he is afraid you will get rich and oust him from his empire of bastard children and fatherless, brotherless women. Better to have you under his thumb - that's why he doesn't pawn you off to some rich businessman."

A cold gust of wind stirs the choked air in the emptying thoroughfare. "And you?"

Fatima flashes her a smile.

"Jinns are just as often good spirits as they are bad, and you make me a lot of money." Discreetly, she tucks some of those crumpled bills into the breast of her high black dress. "I figure that perhaps I can save enough to make my own dowry, and - Where are you going?" Stumbling into a stand she calls severely, "Ororo? Where are you going?"

The other woman doesn't answer; she simply vanishes into the waning crowd.

* * *

><p>"Chyort voz'mi." - The internet tells me that this is "damn it" in Russian. Since my Russian knowledge is comprised of being able to ask how someone is, what something is, and the phrase "The man has short hair," I've had to take this at face value. If it isn't correct, let me know and I'll be sure to fix it. I hope Sean's accent wasn't too "They're after me Lucky Charms" - I based the phonetics around my own experiences in Dublin, as well as what I've seen from various Irish films. As always, if it's not correct, let me know!<p>

As always, I love hearing from readers - comments, criticism, the works! Nothing inspires me to update more than a review!


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: All involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended - I am most definitely not making any money off of this, as my bank account proves. I just like playing with the toys.

Thanks to those who reviewed last chapter! I am also very pleased to announce that this story has been added to Kilowatt's Inventory of Comics Known for Advanced Substance and Style (K.I.C.K.A.S.S.), which is a collection of some of the best comic book fics on FF! So go and check out the community and subscribe!

* * *

><p>Chapter Three<p>

* * *

><p>"Scott?" He has a hard time remembering his foster mother's name. Defined by her absence, with a nondescript voice, pillow-soft hands and a smell that drifts somewhere between store-bought soap and heat sweat, this one is no different than his previous half-dozen. "There are some people coming to see you later. They said that they were from the government? Something like that. They'll be here at three."<p>

The clack of shoes against the kitchen tile, the whisper of clothing creases, and he knows that they're here for him. Earlier that morning he had carefully rubbed his thumb across the buttons of each of his jackets, until he found the smooth glass ones of his best blazer; he had traced his fingers across the three ties he owned, searching for the little Braille tags the southern girl had sewed to the backs with ill-grace: R for red. He had asked his unremembered foster mother to tie it for him, and she had promised but evaded his follow-ups.

It is moments like those, holding the little strip of silky cloth in one hand, that he feels most helpless.

Footsteps – three people, probably; the click of heels, so one woman among them. He expects that they're here to take him to a group home, maybe, or that one of them is his "life coach" or perhaps a potential employer. Undoubtedly, their voices will be ratcheted with the high notes of pity, and they will speak to him slowly and loudly, as if he's deaf and dumb as well.

He wishes he was wearing the tie.

"Hello Mr. Summers." Scott had retired to a hard, high-backed chair in the kitchen to wait, listening to the clock tick, to the other kids screaming through the walls, to the low murmur of the TV. The man who addresses him makes him forget those sounds immediately. Had he ever imbibed before, he would have said that voice was like aged liquor – impossibly rich, impossibly smooth. Suddenly alert and cognizant of movement around him, Scott sits up more stiffly, flinches in expectation, in confusion.

Thin, tapered fingers gently capture his from where they rest tensely on his knee, and press them reassuringly. A chair scrapes against the floor as it is pulled away from the table; the wood of it creaks with introduced weight. The man with the honeyed, mellow voice smells deeply of antiseptic and starch.

"We've been watching you for a long time." And to Scott's surprise, his hand is drawn up, and his fingertips guided to brush against unfamiliar features. Like a child he feels the map of this strange man's visage, and it's like tracing his hands over a textured globe: the sharp ridge of an aquiline nose, thin lips, the crevices of age. The stranger's eyes remain a mystery – the presence of think, rectangular lenses impede Scott's tentative path, and he withdraws. "I'm a scientist, one who has some experience with your affliction. I want to help you see, Scott."

Scott opens his lips to reply, but only a thin, trembling sigh escapes him. From one bandaged eye a single tear escapes, and he can feel it burn down his cheek. Somewhere behind the mellow-voiced man, his accomplices let out little murmurs of wonder.

"Will you let us help you, Scott?"

"Yes," he croaks. "Yes, please, I'll do anything—"

He'll only realize later that he never got the man's name.

* * *

><p>"You're going to have to tell us your name sooner or later."<p>

"Mah name is kiss mah ass."

The officer is a huge black man, whose Easter Island-esque features might have been terrorizing to the uncultured eye – eyen more so due to the harsh shadows cut across his face by the single overhead bulb. But police stations have become, over the last few years, her home away from home, and she can see the greenness around his gills when his mouth twitches upwards, though he coughs demurely to cover it. He's not much older than she is, after all – probably fresh from the academy.

"Okay, Ms. Mah Ass," He even gives it the little southern flourish, which might have tickled her under separate circumstances. He reaches over and gently shoves her scuffed left boot from where it's propped on the table. "Want to tell me why you were shoplifting?"

"'Cause mah generation is full of whores and delinquents, and Ah ain't all that into touchin'."

"You were shoplifting food." Suddenly she's ashamed. Her body shifts in the hard metal of the foldout chair as she turns her eyes away from the harsh interrogation room light, to study the concrete walls around her. The handcuffs bite into her wrists. "People only do that when they're hungry."

She doesn't get the chance to cut out a witty reply – the other officer, this one pudgy, unshaven and reeking (if only figuratively) of paid-for sex, returns with a bang of the single door. He tosses a file onto the coffee-ringed table. "Fingerprints are back. Seems you got quite the rap, girlie." He turns the metal chair beside black cop around and straddles it, the bulge of his crotch hidden by the greater bulge of his gut. "Knew we did right bringing this girl in. Got half a dozen arrests on robbery, shoplifting, even one for solicitation—"

"That charge was bullshit!"

White cop seems bemused by the venomous reaction; he grins, rubs the scruffy outcroppings on his chin. "First turned up a few years ago, abandoned or a runaway - spent a short time in a psychiatric hospital, goin' on about having some kid living in her head. Supposed to be in foster care, now. Habitual runaway, this one. What's your excuse this time?"

"Ten kids livin' in a three bedroom shit hole. Yer right, foster care was the goddamn Hilton." She cups her face with her handcuffed hands in mock amazement, cries, "What coulda come over me t' drive me t' leave? Lawd have mercy!"

Black cop hides another one of those creeping grins. "What's her name?"

"Dunno. Got no records on her before her committal to psychiatric care – wasn't carrying any identification as far as a driver's license, student ID, nothing. No missing person's report matches her description. Rap sheet says all they can get out of her is some street shit – Rogue."

"Rogue what?" This addressed to her. Her theatrical mask has long since fallen back into a sneer; now, it morphs into a scowl.

"Just Rogue."

A moment of strained silence, and the two officers exchange a look. White cop scratches his stomach, smacks his lips. "Alright, let's put her into lockup, arraignment tomorrow. No more free rides, my southern belle – rap sheet like this, looks like it's juvie for you."

Rogue rolls her eyes as black cop comes up behind her and places his hands in her shoulders, gently guiding her to her feet, "Be still, mah quiverin' heart."

* * *

><p>BEEP<p>

Everything whispers. Her slippered feet whispered against the tile as they walked her down the hall, her gown against the thin mattress as they lay her down. Now, their talk amongst each other sounds like willow trees disturbed by the wind.

Everything whispers but the machines they've pinned to her.

She's never been so afraid in her life.

BEEP

_"Mr. and Mrs. Grey, I'm afraid that medication has proved largely ineffective in treating your daughter's schizophrenia."_

BEEP

"Everything will be fine," they whisper as they strap her down by her wrists, her ankles. As a long flat belt is secured across her forehead.

"Try to relax," they whisper as a needle pricks a cold burrow into the hollow of her arm. It scares her more than it hurts and she lets out a little wail of incomprehension.

BEEP

"_I'm afraid that electroconvulsive therapy is your best option, especially since your insurance will be running out within the next few months. ECT allows for the quickest and often most dramatic improvement in catatonic patients."_

"_She's only catatonic because of all those drug you have her on-!"_

"_John, please—"_

BEEP

They soothe, they pacify, and soon even her previously floating state seems so solid, in comparison - all the tendons in her body have evaporated, all of her muscles turned to sludge. The world around her dissolves into a waking reverie: the whispers a soft respiration, and the figures in white half-glimpsed, floating wraiths.

BEEP

"_Will it hurt her?"_

"_No, she will be unconscious for the procedure. The electrical current that is passed through her brain is simply to induce a seizure - one that is completely under our control. There is a moderate risk of memory loss, though it will be temporary. Some individuals lose some cognitive function, but it usually returns with time. But mortality rates are very, very low for this procedure."_

BEEP

Drifting, drifting, only the frigid touch of a cold gel against her temple brings her back a little. Her eyes flare, and Doris smiles as she presses one thing, two things, red things, blue things to stick to her left temple.

BEEP

"_We should speak to her about this, I'm not sure I want to make any decision without –"_

"_Jean isn't in any condition to consent, Mrs. Grey. In my professional opinion, this is the best chance of you ever getting your daughter back."_

BEEP

"Open up, Jean." The push something between her teeth and tell her to bite. It tastes rubbery and hard and stale. The machine beside her hums and a black mask covers her face, and

_Daddy's just mowed the lawn and it smells like fresh cut grass, so soft beneath her feet and she sits, tearing apart a daisy – he loves me, he loves me not, with no particular beau in mind. "I'm sorry," Annie says with a smile and Jean can't even remember why they're fighting but she still feels a little sulky inside, even as Annie offers her the Frisbee. "Still friends?"_

_"Still friends," and Jean plasters on a smile as she stands and takes the Frisbee, tosses it to Annie gently, and Annie fumbles even at so short a throw because she has all the grace of a big-footed puppy. Annie laughs, and Jean laughs, and Annie tosses it back and Jean catches it and throws only this time she really lets it fly and Annie chases it and she doesn't even see_

Was it me?_ Blood, blood everywhere, and everything smells like old pennies as Annie gutters and Jean screams, as Jean runs into the street with the same sort of recklessness that got Annie_

(killed)

S_he falls down beside the other girl even as the driver fumbles out of his car with a wretched wail, and mommy and daddy come running_

_"She ran out right in front of me! I didn't even see-!"_

cold, socoldeverything

everything iscold

Did I push it? Did I reach out and push it? I didn't mean to I don't think but sometimes when I think about it maybe I did, maybeIwas dumb and mad akidstupidkid and maybe I reached out and pushed the Frisbee into the

dying

scared I don't want to I'm so scared mommy

I'mdying

someonehelpme please someone help ithurtssomuch

help me

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP

"Shut it off! Shut it down!"

"Oh my God! Is everyone all right?"

"Jesus Christ! _Jesus Christ! _What the fuck was that?"

BEEP BEEP BEEP

"It . . . it must have been an earthquake. Do we need to evacuate the building?"

"An earthquake? Shit was flying across the room! I used to live in California and I've never seen a fucking earthquake do that!"

BEEP

"Everyone just calm down! Doris, get Jean to the recovery room, please. I might have been some sort of localized . . . mass hallucination. I've read about this—"

"Doctor—"

"Just do it!"

Velcro unstrapped, wires unhooked. The mask is gone and the rubber thing between her teeth follows. Her jaw aches. Her head feels bigger than the world. Shaking, she can't stop shaking.

The squeak of wheels. She wants Dad Mom Sara, tries to tell Doris but nothing comes out but slow, sour tears.

Voices, now faraway:

"That was some poltergeist shit. Or Carrie – you ever seen that movie? Jesus Christ. Do you think she-?"

"Call someone to get this place cleaned up, would you? And kindly keep your ridiculous opinions to yourself."

* * *

><p>"Oh my gosh." Kitty rubs her eyes in an almost comic expression of disbelief, and rests her chin in her hands. There's no one else in the school library during lunchtime, so there's no one for her brief exclamation to startle other than the librarian. Said librarian shoots her a look of obligatory annoyance, and issues a curt, "Shh!"<p>

Kitty notices neither. "Oh my gosh."

Lunchtime in the library is better than the alternative. She's only been at this school for a couple of weeks but already the round chorus of rumors have started, and they bubble up behind her as she passes in the halls, through the gym; they fill the lulling silences of study time in class:

"Seriously, she was helping Mr. Fletcher with the projector and she touched it and it just died. Weirdo."

"Bet you her mom did drugs when she was pregnant. Like that Stephen King book, what's it called-?"

"Freak."

So it's better to eat a big breakfast and sit in the library away from the murmuring, away from the apologetic glances of people who might have been her friends if she was only a nerd, rather than a freak of nature as well. At least at this school she hasn't killed any of the computers, too, and can sit and putter around her favorite forums and random sites for an hour, until the bell rings. Before her previous schools had firmly requested that she transfer out, she had been notorious for wiping out whole blocks of computer lab terminals and had been consequently banned from electronic school property – not that that had been the reason that they'd given for kicking her out. At both schools, they'd structured their requests in such a way that she might have felt somewhat flattered for being asked to leave, under other circumstances: "Our teachers aren't trained to handle someone with such genius. Have you looked into private schools?"

It was the first time 15-year-old Kitty Pryde had experienced the pretext of, "It's not you, it's me."

"It can't be." And she scrolls down to the comments section under the photograph and accompanying news story, and sure enough, there's plenty of disbelief and vitriol:

**67 Comments** | Popular Now | **Newest** | Oldest |Most Replied

Agent Cheese 3 minutes ago | Report Abuse

FAKE! Look close: hard light/soft shadows = fake.

Reply

Pooncatcher64 5 minutes ago | Report Abuse

Omg its like these news people don't know that thers photoshop

Relpy

Orangery 16 minutes ago | Report Abuse

You have to admit that it's a pretty good manipulation, though – if it wasn't so obviously contrived, you'd probably have to go into a pixel-count to disprove it.

Reply

And that lessens her enthusiasm a little. But after a contemplative moment she scrolls back up and stares at the picture, biting her lips. In a sudden paroxysm she hits Ctrl + P. The printer behind the sour-faced librarian hums to life. She pays the ten cents for the printed pages, folds the printed story (like she's trying to keep a secret) in three equal parts, like a dossier. Keeping it in hand, she walks out into B Hall. And keeps going.

For the first time in her life, Kitty Pryde cuts class.

She keeps expecting someone to stop her when she pushes open the double doors, when she walks up the street to the city bus stop, when she hops on the 12:15 and rides it to the fourth stop. For any naysayers she tries to keep a carefully constructed façade of purpose on her face (which, to any viewer, looks like white-lipped panic, the papers in her hands clutched in a death-grip) while cooking up a hundred different excuses: Doctor's appointment, dentist appointment, seminary class . . . But no one does. In just a few minutes she's striding up the stairs to her front door.

And then she stops.

Her parents don't fight, not exactly. It would be easier if they fought – if they screamed and broke things; at least then there would be a kind of release, an airing out of all their infection. But instead everything – the tension, the anger, the resentment – festers in a backbreaking silence.

She's not sure when things changed, when her dad stared taking his food in the den because he has "this big project" that never gets done, when questions became perfunctory or overly searching, accusative; when the soulless murmur of the TV, the creaking of stairs, the clicking of keyboards, the closing of doors came to define their relationships with each other.

She doesn't know exactly when it started, but she's pretty sure it's her fault. Because she couldn't make the headaches stop and none of the doctors had any answers. Because when the headaches finally stopped the other thing wouldn't, and they'd had to move twice because Kitty can't manage to go even a few days without someone seeing _something_, without messing something up in a shower of sparks.

Hand on the gleaming doorknob, she can't help but things would be better if . . .

"_Can't you just try and stop, Kitty? Can't you just try really hard to be . . ?"_

Before things had broken between them so badly she could sometimes hear her parents in the kitchen, after she was supposed to have gone to sleep. Sometimes creeping down the stairs (not even realizing she was phased, so they wouldn't creak) she would press her ear to the wall separating them, or, sometimes, if she was feeling really brave, she would push herself into the wall and sit between wall studs and in the dust, listening. The complaints were always the same: how they can't keep moving, there aren't any jobs; how Kitty's grades are slipping, and she's not going to get into a good school; how people are starting to talk here, too. "What are we going to do?" "Hush, she'll hear you, hush."

After the first time, Kitty had pulled forty dollars from her college fund account – something her parents had given her access to for "emergencies only". When her father had asked, she had said that it was for the membership fee for a debate club she had joined and dropped out of three days later when her witness statement had fallen through her hands during a mock trial. Every week after that, another forty dollars or so had gone into the stash, with another excuse to go along with it: AP test fees, new outfit for dance class, math club tournament entry fee . . . After a while, they had stopped asking. She had picked up extra jobs along the way, too – babysitting for people who hadn't heard about her, who hadn't been poisoned against her. Kid's stuff – raking and mowing lawns, bringing old ladies their groceries, feeding neighbors cats and bringing in their mail when they were out of town. Until that moment when she saw the picture, she never knew exactly what she was working for.

Hand tightening on the knob, Kitty finally pushes open the door, and steps inside. For some reason, it looks all knew to her, though the furniture, the pictures, are familiar. She supposes that's the appeal of a new house – that when the layout is different and the carpet is new, everything looks a little different, a little refreshed. Like an old friend with a new haircut.

She's afraid, when she heads up the stairs with lightly pattering steps that echo in that awful silence, that the familiarity will keep her. That despite the new smell of a new house, the intimate habits will make her stay – the way her dad always leaves his breakfast dishes on the counter no matter how her mom complains; the way her mom's make-up is always spread out on the coffee table, since she likes to watch the news while "putting on her face."

She fumbles open the folded papers in her hand and looks at the picture, now rendered in black and white from the school's cheap printer, but no less dramatic for its lack of color. And then she heads upstairs.

She dumps the books out of her backpack and starts throwing clothes from her closet, from her drawers into the bag's gaping maw. The familiar hat box is retrieved from its spot high up on the shelf.

She sits on her bed and counts its contents twice.

$448.72

After filling her backpack with clothes and her toothbrush she hesitates for a moment over the other contents of her bookcase, and takes only two things: her old teddy bear, and her copy of _Anna Karenina_. Forty dollars go into her front pocket; the rest of the money is tucked into a HelloKitty purse, which is, in turn, hidden deeply between a pair of jeans and a knit sweater. She puts on her heaviest jacket, steps into her heaviest boots, winds a scarf around her throat.

She thinks about leaving a note, and in the end, doesn't. Her steps downstairs are much heavier with the sound of her boots. She thinks that the door might squeak when she pulls it open, as if the house itself will protest her leaving. In the end, though, it doesn't, and she shuts it firmly behind her.

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><p>Review!<p> 


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: All involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended - I am most definitely not making any money off of this, as my bank account proves. I just like playing with the toys.

Thanks to those who reviewed last chapter! Sorry this took so long, I was on a wild and stressful visit to extended family and had precious little time to internets, much less write. Hope you enjoy!

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><p>Chapter Four<p>

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><p>The drive to the hospital is a silent one; inquiries are made in hushed grief decorum, and their silence is filled with the sounds of sickness – anonymous machines beeping, subdued coughing, the squeak of old shoes on the shining tile floor. The contour plastic chairs are uncomfortable, which makes the already intolerable wait endless; some soap opera siren wailing "Fernando!" in the corner isn't enough to drag her away from the abyss of her own memory, which is kneading over the past few hours with an obsessiveness and clarity that borders on the insane. The smell of burning fat sticks like paste to the back of her throat.<p>

"Want some coffee? " Val isn't entirely sure that her stomach can handle anything else, but she reluctantly agrees. As Sean hands her the little styrofoam cup, the phone in his pocket trills. He fumbles, nearly spills the brown tar on her, hurriedly apologizes and retreats. "Hallo?"

And as much as the rotten hospital coffee washes the taste of death out of her mouth, she can't get it out of her mind: the image of the boxcar's flame-blackened walls. The bodies, some of them nothing more than murky puddles of fat and black splinters of bone. Whatever God there might be wasn't kind enough to give them all quick endings, or, at least, anonymous deaths – there were plenty of blistered and charred half-faces remaining, all of their expressions mauled with agony, with fear. Plenty of bodies that had run into one another like tallow, until what remained was something from Lovecraft's personal hell. A lot of the bodies had broken arms, broken fingers, ripped and ragged fingernails from trying to escape; the red door of the boxcar was clawed silver. They were so young, most of them, and they must have been so afraid . . .

She and Sean had stayed until the forensic guys were done and the medical examiner guys had started clearing the scene, they picking up the death-stiff bodies like pieces of driftwood, placing them inside body bags. More than one corpse, upon its gentle placement, had let out a cloud of black chaff like a spent, kicked fire.

Now, Sean stands across the bleak hospital hallway in a somewhat-hunched stance that means he's hiding a conversation from prying eyes (not that there's really anyone here but her.) He's smiling into his phone's receiver and his eyes, previously reflecting her own desolation, have softened.

"Tá grá agam duit."He says finally and hangs up his phone, replaces it in his pocket. Val looks away, tries to look occupied with her coffee as he comes to sit next to her.

They sit in silence for a moment, sipping their coffee.

"You ever had one that bad before?" She ventures, finally.

"No." The good humor vanishes from his features – in an instant, he looks ten years older. He rubs his eyes with one hand. "MutteraChroist."

"Was that your wife on the phone?" Hoping to change the subject, honestly – though she hasn't seen a ring on his finger. That brilliant plan both works and backfires; Cassidy's tired expression drifts from morose to the sort of familiar misery that only time can beat into a person's features.

"No. My wife died a long time ago."

"I'm sorry."

A smile sidles across his face, chased by an expression of disbelief. "Why? Were you the one that done it? All these years of fruitless searchin' only to be paired wit' the guilty party!" A half-hearted wink. He reaches into his back pocket, produces a worn leather wallet; from that he extracts a photo cracked not from age but handling. "No, that was my daughter on the phone. Teresa."

"She's beautiful." Val isn't just being polite. Teresa's features are more delicate than her father's, and her hair charges past strawberry blonde and into a brassy orange that most women would murder for. But she's got the same bluish-green eyes, and her skin is pale as well, perhaps emphasized by the school uniform she seems vaguely exasperated with. In a matching mauve sweater and knee socks, a pleated skirt and an oxford shirt-and-tie, this skinny little pre-beauty rolls her eyes at her audience. She's got her father's humor then, too.

"She's a moighty handful, that one. Our screamin' matches are about enough t' bring the damn castle doun." And then he laughs. Val smiles back quizzically, not getting the joke, but laughing a little anyways.

"Agent Cassidy, Agent Cooper?" They both look up to meet the impatient amber eyes of a small black woman, and the laughing stops. 'No-nonsense' doesn't being to describe the woman's expression – she looks like she hasn't cracked a genuine smile since long before med school. "I'm Doctor Cecilia Reyes. The patient is ready for you."

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><p>They are both filthy. Filthy isn't even the word – they might not even be recognizably human, Piotr thinks as he tries valiantly to smudge the mud off of Illyana's face with hands that are covered with it, and so only succeeds in painting brown eddies into her cheeks. Those glacial eyes of hers are singing as she bats his hands away and dances a few steps from him, then notices with sudden disdain, "Aww, it got in my hair!"<p>

"That is what you get for playing in the mud," he says as he turns and starts back towards the truck. The field is clear of tree trunks now, deeply pitted with their upturned nests.

"You pushed me!"

"Yes, but you threw a ball of mud at me. You should have considered that I am both stronger and faster than you before you launched that ill-planned attack."

"But I'm _smarter!_" And she jumps up onto his back in another ill-planned attack; his clothes are probably already ruined so he falls forward in a death stagger, knees hitting the ground with a small splash, then his hands. Illyana flees, squealing as he rolls onto his back. She starts running around his collapsed figure towards the truck, stops when she realizes he isn't following.

"Petya, come on, it's almost lunch time." He lays supine in the mud, unmoving, eyes closed.

"Piotr Nikolaievitch! I'm hungry! No more playing!" He says nothing, remains silent and still.

Her voice starts to sound a little nervous. "Stop it, it's not funny!" She creeps closer, until she's hovering over him. "Come ON!" And she stamps her little foot.

"AH!" In a sudden attack he grabs her leg and pulls her down into the mud with him; she screams as she falls on her butt, as he wraps her into a wrestler's hold.

"Piotr Nikolaievitch, LET ME GO!"

"Did you say something Snowflake? I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I am dead. You have killed me."

"STOP IT!" He finally releases her and she has gotten that sulky scowl that he knows so well. She struggles into a stand. The bottom of her dress is absolutely saturated with black mud and as she turns to study it, her expression becomes one of horror. "It looks like I POOPED!"

He can't help it; he doubles over, emitting sounds too deep to really be described as giggles, until tears are forming in the corners of his eyes. "You're MEAN!" She shouts at him, then stomps over to the truck. Wiping his eyes, still half-laughing, he manages to stand without slipping, and follows.

The ride back to their home is a silent one, with Illyana sitting in the passenger seat, her face screwed up in petulance, her arms tightly crossed – the ride over the bumpy road makes her exaggerated expression of indignation silly, as she bounces against the binding of her seat belt and struggles to keep her arms against her chest. He looks over at her often and when she catches him, she shoots him sour glares. He sticks out his tongue at her, and he can tell that she is struggling very hard not to smile.

"Are you going to say you're sorry?" She says finally, loudly.

"For what?"

"For pulling me into the mud!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about. I was dead at the time. Some little blonde snowflake probably killed me - you should ask her for an apology."

"Ugh, you're so STUPID!" But her expression has changed into one of belligerent amusement, and when they finally pull into the muddy causeway that marks their driveway, she turns to him and says, "We need to sneak in the back way and change, so we don't get yelled at."

He nods soberly. Once out of the car, he allows her to take him by the hand and lead him to the back door. They kick off their filthy shoes, and she ever so slowly opens the door, as if it's made of glass. She is first – Piotr helps her take off her mud-spattered clothes and then buries them into the waiting wash, and then they head into the wood-paneled washroom. To the left side of the room are two large barrels full of water; a small faucet protrudes from the wall beside it. Illyana stands shivering, teeth chattering as she soaps herself quickly with a sponge, while Piotr mixes the scalding water from the tap with the cold water of the barrel. "Hurry up!" He helps her pour the warm water over her head. After, he wraps her in the robe previously hanging by the door.

"Now go upstairs and change, and be very quiet." He winks and she grins, her previous anger forgotten. She steps into her dirty boots, flitters back out the door as he starts removing his own mud-caked shirt.

"Piotr?" She calls back quietly a moment later. "There's someone in the kitchen." And then she's gone again. After a quizzical pause, he takes enough time to hurriedly wash his face, to try and scrub out the dirt that is caught in the cracks of his knuckles and under his nails; he finds some cleaner jeans, a t-shirt from the waiting laundry and puts them on. Then he leaves the _banya, _and circles around to the kitchen door.

He can hear three voices distinctly, and immediately knows something is wrong. It's not the unfamiliarity of the third voice that causes the hair to rise on the back of Piotr's neck as much as it is the tone: the timbre of the stranger's low voice is terse, commanding, broken by desperate pleading of Piotr's proud father. His mother is crying.

As he comes closer he can begin to make out whole phrases, and he stops, heart in his throat.

"You understood and agreed to the terms we negotiated. You are not honestly trying to circumvent our contract now?"

"You have to understand, there has been so much rain. We couldn't have possibly foreseen! If you just give me more time—"

"I'm sorry." Then, almost placating, "Please do not worry. Better us than what remains of the KGB. We will take good care of him."

"Father?" For a moment Piotr is terrified that he has finally been caught, that his recklessness and selfishness in indulging in that otherworldly power has ruined them. His mother's face is hidden behind a kerchief and she makes little whimpering noises like a wounded dog; his father leaks tears from tired eyes, though he shows no other signs of grief. When Piotr steps in the two look up at him as if flinching from a blow. The man who sits across from them - he dressed in a sharp black suit the weather, their poverty hasn't touched - meets Piotr's eyes with something like satisfaction.

"Oh, Petya." Piotr's father moans as he buries his head in his hands. "Oh, my son, I am so sorry."

* * *

><p>"Got it!" Joanna Cargill leaps into the air with undeniable grace and power – in another world it might have been an action televised live into millions of distant homes, met with the screams of thousands of zealous fans. Instead, in this place of concrete and barbed wire, she spikes a threadbare grey volleyball over a patched net. It flies like a bullet across the gray court.<p>

And hits Rogue in the face. It knocks her off her feet.

"HEY!" The counselor shouts at Cargill, who high-fives her teammates with a smug grin even as Rogue goes down. "No rough stuff!" The rebuke is tired, perfunctory. Cargill simpers.

"I can't help it if the new girl can't move her ass."

Rogue reels on the ground, her nose a fountain of blood; no one helps her but she manages to stagger up. She charges across the court, under the net and then the counselor does approach, pepper spray in hand as Rogue goes at Cargill, screaming, "BITCH! I WILL SLAP THE BLACK OFF YER MOMMA!"

It doesn't really make much sense in retrospect, but it gets the desired result – Cargill launches back with upraised fists, her mouth pulled in a sneer of wrath, "OH, you did NOT just say what I THINK you said—"

Not one, but two counselors drag them apart. "Anna, take five, now!" (They call her Anna because they refuse to indulge in any gang affiliations her moniker is perceived to have – the irony of the chosen name sometimes makes Rogue smirk). So they push Rogue - careful not to actually touch her skin, like she's got something catching - toward the chain link fence and she goes, nose still streaming crimson. No one offers her any help. The other girls watch her with hard, guarded eyes, and she sneers at them as she heads over to the sparse grass of the court's perimeter. Sitting down hard, eyes oozing infuriated tears, she kicks off one shoe and pulls off her small, regulation ankle sock, holds it against a nose that has not only become a bloody mess but a blazing inferno of pain. Her eyes are starting to swell a little too, and her forehead aches; she wonders if Cargill broke anything.

She's been here for a week now – a week of concrete walls, shuddering fluorescent lights and long tile hallways; of crowded rooms that are somehow terribly lonely, where her only privacy is in the unremembered dreams. Of getting in fights that always leave the other party either unconscious or pale and gasping on the floor like a beached trout. She'd fought back the first time, but when solitary had made her consider what kind of noose her panties would make, she had decided that bruises were better than isolation. Cargill may be a superbitch and her cronies might not be any better, but at least they're something.

This latest stunt, though, is making her seriously reconsider her pacifism. God help Cargill if her nose is broken –

"So what you in fo', chere?"

The voice startles her – mostly because it's male. Since coming to this place she's only encountered the other gender through detached screens or over intercoms, and they're never there for her. Nevertheless, after the initial "Who, me?" moment, she's not all that surprised to look up and find a boy, maybe a little older than she, leaning up against the fence, his fingers hooked in the chain links. The boys' compound is next door, after all, though for all the ostensible security it's supposed to be a galaxy away. Behind him, a group of similarly uniformed boys circle the basketball court in a half-assed ring.

"What do you care?" Her nose is swelling up – she's starting to sound like she's got a cold.

"Pretty girl in a place like dis always a concern for Remy LeBeau." Despite their uniforms – khaki pants, navy blue shirts, white sneakers – he manages to wander into the no man's land between sexy and sleazy; in her current disposition, Rogue is more apt to apply the latter. Crew-cut hair slick with grease or intent, his clothes are slept-in disheveled, a look rocked by gritty movie stars and the chronically homeless alike. Beneath a pair of obviously non-regulation sunglasses is a clear five o'clock shadow (despite the fact that it's only now coming up on noon). But Rogue can't help but feel a little spark of charm emanating from the wide grin full of sparkling teeth; his stance, too, reflects an ease in his own skin that's difficult to come by in anyone, much less someone her age. "So?"

"So what?"

"What you in fo', girl? Bein' deaf?"

She rolls her eyes. "Fer beatin' up sleazy Cajun swamp rats."

"Ah, right through _mon coeur!_" He clutches at his chest, staggers back from the fence; her lips twitch up, despite her best efforts. That makes his grin widen. "Oh, see, dere's de belle dat drew me all de way over from de mindless hamster wheel." He tips his head back towards the running group, then collapses on the sparse grass beside her, eyes her through the holes in the fence. "I bet you been framed, dat it? No way a pretty t'ing like you done anyt'ing t' deserve a place like dis."

"You'd be surprised."

"You didn't do anyt'ing t' deserve dat." He points at her nose, "That girl is - how do you say? - a bitch. Pardon my French. Let me see." Begrudgingly, she pulls the sock away from her face.

"Looks like you gonna get a couple of shiners, but I don' t'ink it's broken."

"Thanks." Sourly, then, in a tone that she hopes conveys that she wants to be left alone, "We ain't supposed to fraternize." She tips her head to gesture over his shoulder, where one of the counselors seems to be watching them. Remy brushes at the air in an offhand manner.

"That's de worst punishment of all chere, But don't worry, ol Remy's been in de system so long, he's got friends everywhere." As if to demonstrate he gives the counselor supervising the female players a two-fingered salute; the counselor eyes him for a second, then turns away. "I don' make no trouble, keep t'ings quiet, an' dey doan mind."

"And what exactly have you done to gain a level of such prestige? Ah wouldn't think they'd look on male prostitutes so highly here."

A grin, as he ignores that last little touch of acerbic wit. "Oh, little bit o' dis, little bit o' dat. Auto theft, larceny, breakin' an' enterin'. After a while, an homme lose track of what he done t' offend de cultured masses." He reaches two fingers through the hole in the fence, as if to brush her cheek, "I jes never learn –"

"Don't touch me." At her backwards flinch Remy's hand retracts; he looks hurt, but his smile quickly retakes the hill.

"I ain't got nothin' catchin', chere. But if you want t' take t'ings slow, I respect that. I am a southern gentleman, after all. And you are most certainly a respectable southern lady." His grin turns coy and he flips two fingers – and voila, a card, the Queen of Hearts, and she would not under any circumstances admit that she felt a little prickle of childish wonder at seeing it appear from nowhere – his sleeves are short, after all.

He offers it to her through the gap in the links. "However, I will have to insist on yo' name."

"You insist?" She rolls her eyes as she snatches the card, eyes it, then him. "This shit don't actually work on those other girls, does it? This creepy, cheesy thang you got goin' on." She gestures at him in an up-and-down sweeping motion. "So what do you do, Remy LeBeau, seduce the girls and get the guards to let you sneak in at night or somethin'? Or do you just wait until y'all get out, have yer fun flings an move on? You get off on screwed up girls with criminal records and attachment issues?"

She expects him to react like everyone else does to her trenchant tongue – for that dark cloud of offense and hurt to cloud his features; for him to stand swiftly, call her a bitch, and storm off. It's happened more times, with more boys, than she can count. But to her surprise, he just keeps grinning. "I knew dere was somet'in more dan dat smile dat brought me over here, chere, and I t'ink I jes figured out what it is. You fiery. I like dat." He rises, stretching his spine like a cat. "You keep dat card. There'll be time for names later." He winks as he begins sauntering back to his own side of the field. "Though I expect sooner. A bientot, chere!" And he gives her a lazy, two-fingered wave.

Rogue watches him go, having stood nearly in tandem with him, clutching the card in her hands. The boys had begun to collect and the volleyball game is called (no one is the winner, it's not about winning) and the counselor is calling for "Anna."

Rogue tears the card in two and drops it in the scant grass, where he's sure to find it.

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><p>She should just go. She could, if she wanted to – she always wears her mother's jewel on a chain around her neck, and it's the only thing she has worth keeping. But there is the issue of funds, and Ororo's never been naïve enough to think that money doesn't form the axis of everything.<p>

That, and she owes El-Gibar a goodbye, at least.

The money is hidden behind a loose tile in the room that she shares with Fatima; she's never been naïve enough to test the idea of 'honor among thieves', either. The fruit of a lifetime of labor (too often depleted by a too-generous heart) is enough to get her started, though she's lucky that her occupation is just as mobile as she is.

She heads downstairs and can hear the other children playing in the yard, games strange to the uncultured eye, ones not found anywhere else but in El-Gibar's dusty courtyard. They are the kissing cousins of the familiar childhood romps like tag and hide-and-go-seek, only these are designed to teach children how to strip pockets without being noticed, how to hide from the flashlights of police. How not to be seen. She played them herself, a long time ago.

She almost presses on when she hears low tones coming from the luscious darkness of the salon; they're supposed to be a struggling orphanage but everyone has their vices, and El-Gibar happens to bear his particular blemish in style. Furnished in deep royal purples and blues, crushed velvet drapes and thick Persian carpet, dimly lit with recessed lighting, one entire wall of El-Gibar's salon is dominated by a massive television – one that can be hidden in a moment, if necessary. It's a room forbidden to the children, and Ororo herself has only been in it once before. Inside she can hear the clinking of cups and muted tones in what she only subconsciously recognizes as English, can smell the soft mint of tea. Ororo stands before the door, almost trembling – not with fear, exactly, but the cautious trepidation of a life finally started . . . and maybe the grief that it had taken her so long to begin.

_Am I really doing this? _She'd promised herself she would so many times before . . . she had almost managed to on half a dozen occasions. But something had always held her back. Girls like Fatima, who needed her even if she needs no one herself.

And then she hears her name, and, thinking herself summoned, strides into the dim recesses of the room. She is therefore just as surprised when El-Gibar and guest react as if interrupted, with the embarrassment of invaded privacy. The atmosphere in the sumptuous den suddenly becomes tense, uncomfortable, and the prickle of excitement in her stomach blackens at the edges, as if burned.

"I did not mean to interrupt." El-Gibar's single guest meets her eyes unflinchingly, and some center in Ororo turns to cagey steel.

El-Gibar rises with an awkwardness she has never seen before. "I came to say goodbye." Her declaration comes out weaving, her eyes, attention still fixed on the unfamiliar man. He is a westerner in an expensive suit that stretches at the knees and waist for his wide girth and stature; he, too, has come into a stand. Despite his ruddy-blonde hair and beard, his grin, his small, squinted eyes make her think of a fat jackal. He offers his hand and she makes no motion to take it, acknowledging it with the same expression she would use if someone were offering her a black adder.

She looks to El-Gibar, finally, the man she considered as a father in her youth and as an equal as of late (feelings she thought were reciprocated). When he does not meet her eyes, she knows.

"Ororo, this is Mr. Henry Leland." He says quietly.

"What is this?"

The man called Henry Leland says something to her in English – she recognizes only one word, "America". She ignores him, eyes trained on El-Gibar.

"What is this?" It is not so much a question as a spat. There is no answer. "I am going to Kenya. Thank you for all that you have done for me. Tell Mr. Leland that it was pleasant meeting him." And she turns back towards the door.

"Ororo—" Leland is making annoyed protestations as she stalks towards the doorway, and El-Gibar calls only half-heartedly, "Ororo, please, you don't understand—"

And then something happens. She won't remember much of it afterward, only the impression of sudden, terrific weight on her body, as if her limbs have been pumped full of lead. With a startled shout she drops to her knees and they explode with pain at the hard impact with the ground. Then, to all fours; her hands slap stinging against the tile – now El-Gibar is running towards her.

"Ororo? What is wrong?" She can't move; sweat has sprung up on her brow from the effort of trying to drag her trembling limbs up, of just staying on all fours and not crashing into the Earth – with a toneless cry of incomprehension a sudden dry wind blasts through the room, and throws El-Gibar from his path, into the far wall. Something shatters, and the whipping wind tears the curtains from their rods. Overhead, the sky blackens with the suddenness and ferocity of an act of God, and the children in the courtyard still, watching. The man Leland remains, though, and walks towards her calmly, clucking in English. She sees the liquid shine of his polished shoes and her head is hit by a sudden impossible weight and her neck gives; her forehead slams down into the floor hard enough to crack the tile beneath it.

Then, nothing.

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><p>Agh, accents, the bane of my existence. If I should ease up on Remy's 'th' replacement for reading-ease let me know - I tore my hair out contemplating authenticity vs. readability. Also, I have absolutely no experience with juvenile detention facilities, and the internet, surprisingly, is not a fountain of knowledge in this respect. So, as always, if there are any glaring mistakes, let me know!<p>

"Tá grá agam duit." - the internet says this is Irish for "I love you."

mon coeur - French; my heart

As always, review review review!


	5. Chapter 5

Crickey! Sorry for the long wait on the update. The holiday season was a bit crazy for me, but it's all over and so now we can get back on track (also, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all of my readers!)

Many thanks to those who have reviewed so far! As always, all involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended.

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><p>Chapter Five<p>

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><p>It's one of those dilapidated churches that Stryker is always astounded still survive, what with the current fever of godlessness overtaking the world, Europe especially. Little more than mortar clinging to stone, there's only a single stained glass window that he can see, depicting Christ in arid yellows; the others have clear undulation of tempered glass, probably so immaculately preserved not because of their historical significance, but because replacing them would be an astronomical cost.<p>

"Thank you for coming." The little rotund man who meets him at the ancient door must have told Stryker his name a dozen times over the phone, but Stryker can never hope to remember it; it's full of guttural grunts and sashaying vowels and violent consonants. The door closes behind him with a muted thunder and the little priest scuttles up the old tile of the aisle, they cracked and dull-colored under foot. The interior of the church is about what Stryker expects; if you've see one old-world church you've seen them all, and this is no different: white walls, wood pews, idolatry in gilded gold, reeking of wet stone and the disparate hopes of dead ages. Two small wings flank the building, places of private prayer separated from the church's womb by dark oak doors. Stryker notices pointedly that one of them is closed and padlocked.

He's amazed this place hasn't been pillaged by the godless heathen youth. Speaking of devils - two young men sit in the pews near the locked door, worrying holes into their knit hats. When Stryker enters they spring to their feet, words tumbling over one another. Stryker silences them with a raised hand.

"Where is it?" It takes a full five minutes for the fat little priest to manage the padlock; his hands are quivering so badly the keys ring like Christmas bells. When he finally manages to find the right key he struggles to pull the bolt. It gives with a rusty whine.

They've chained the thing to a massive marble statue of the Virgin Mary, Christ in hand. Her sober, empty eyes stare them down as they enter the secluded area, and the priest fastens the door behind them. There appears to be no need for the measure – the thing is either unconscious or dead, lying in a pool of it's own burn-black shadow. A chandelier overhead radiates a dim, iodine light, along with seemingly a thousand candles in their iron cradles; when Stryker casts a speculatory glance to the indistinct sunshine filtering in from the window one of the pale-faced boys says, "It disappears in the dark."

"I tried holy water, as well as the invocatio," the priest's voice is as dry as autumn leaves as Stryker kneels down before Mary. There is a sharp intake of breath as Stryker touches the thing, turns its face upwards. Its features remain etched in shadow, even exposed so directly to the light. A shudder of disgust scuttles up his spine. "It had no affect."

They retire back to the church's foyer. It doesn't take nearly as long for the priest to lock the door behind them as he did in opening it.

"Is it . . . is it a demon?"

"Where did you find it?"

The two young men look at each other. Their English is clipped and cultured, and the fear etched into their features is tinged with disorientation, rather than any real Christian hate. Learned boys, then, who yesterday scoffed at fairy tales. "In the forest," one of them says finally, "we were tracking it . . . we, we thought it was a bear that had wandered up from the south. We wanted to tag it. But when we shot it with the tranquilizer dart it did this - this thing –"

"It . . . there was smoke but something must have gone wrong because it reappeared further in the valley-"

"- and then we knew it wasn't—"

"I wanted to kill it when we found it." The other boy inputs severely. "But then Will said that it was wearing clothes, that it might just be someone possessed—"

"You did well." Stryker says to the boy called Will, and he smiles weakly, while his companion only looks further perturbed.

"What will we do now?"

"You will do nothing. I am calling some of my associates in. We will take care of it."

"Reverend." And the priest touches his arm, draws him aside. His ruddy, stout face glowing in eagerness – something that Stryker would admit he had felt, once, when first exposed to these . . . _things._ It was the sort of excitement of a child discovering Santa Claus really does exist, the exuberance of unrealized expectation met and surpassed. "I do not mean to speak out of turn, but – surely you understand that this is a gift! If we can show the people a real . . ." his octave falls to a prayer-whisper, " . . . _demon_ . . ." and rises again, "they will begin to understand the state of their souls! They will flock back to Him! Dry coffers will fill - surely you understand this?"

There was a time when Stryker felt the same. But he knows, now, that there will always be another abomination for the culling. He knows, now, that the moment is not yet ripe. And above all, Stryker is a businessman. Though he will admit this one . . . this one . . .

"Please, Father, I'm on the phone." Stryker breaks away, shrugging off the man's plump hand; he drifts back towards the padlocked door, and traces the intricate carving of saints and sinners etched into the old, polished wood with his long fingers as he holds his little cell phone (abominable gadget, though not without its uses) to his ear. The other end of the line rings faintly, persistently. That face, God, that face - he just might burn this place to the ground.

"Hello?" He murmurs into the silence of the picked-up line. "I've got another one for you."

Maybe they will give it back to him, after they're done.

* * *

><p>"Seriously? Today is the day you people decide to be competent at your jobs?"<p>

She only realizes after she says it that she's said it – it was supposed to be internal dialogue, not Shakespearian mono. Kitty blanches as the large black woman behind the plastic screen raises one perfectly manicured eyebrow.

"Excuse me?"

Kitty bolts, across the gleaming tile and minimalist, echoing recesses of the building that feels more like an airport than a bus station, avoiding the eyes of those occupying the dithering line behind her. She runs outside, though she has to pause for a moment, panting and cursing herself silently, furiously, because she doesn't weigh quite enough to trigger the opening mechanism for the automatic door.

She doesn't leave, though – when someone enters she darts out only to fall into a sit on the curb outside, just in time to catch a large chuff of acrid exhaust in the face by a passing, wheezing bus. She can't leave, not yet – it had taken her two and a half hours to come to Chicago by bus, and she'd have to wait at least another forty minutes before she could hope to catch the returning ride home.

"Stupid idea, anyways." She mutters, wondering if she should go back and explain "you people" to the counter woman – _I didn't mean it the way it sounded_, she will say, _it's just that I'm frustrated that you're not buying that I'm eighteen; it's the complete exasperation that you're not accepting my story that my parents are sick and that's why I'm traveling alone to my grandmother's. Where are all the incompetents who have plagued customer service until this precise moment, who wouldn't even blink if I asked for a ticket to New York?_

"Stupid idea." At least she'll be able to get home before anyone notices she's missing. At least she hadn't left a stupid note. But had she ever believed that this would work, anyways?

"Maybe I'll just take a cab." She mutters to herself as she rises into a stand, dusting off her knees, then her butt self-consciously, watching tides of people coming and going from the huge Greyhound station's gently sighing, automatic doors with miserable jealousy. _Why do I have to be so short? So flat-chested? And my stupid fat cheeks . . . Amy brags about getting into clubs with her fake ID, and I can't even buy a stupid bus ticket._ With another blustery sigh she starts away, hands crammed into her pockets, head tilted down, avoiding the displaced whimsy of passing traveler eyes. Slowly, she heads towards the distant fleet of yellow cabs peeking from just around the corner, who hover and hum like anxious worker bees. "It'll probably cost me a fortune but at least I'll get home before . . ."

A wall.

A brick wall, accompanying her along this particular stretch of sidewalk like an inquiring friend. One that separates her from the long, cigarette box-silver of the buses – of that she's sure. At the edge of the wall is a lackadaisical rent-a-cop, who is checking his nails with scientific interest as a departing bus rolls past him, it grunting and hissing with the effort of joining traffic.

And she looks over her shoulder. There are people, sure, but they have that egotistical look vagabonds most often have – they're not watching each other, they're watching clocks, travel times, departure hours, checking phones and talking into them or just focused-inward, bored, as they slip in an out of the airport-looking bus station and head to wherever it is they've come to go.

She reaches out and touches the red brick – cold, with the bite of grit. Leaning forward now, until it kisses her cheek, her ear, like she's listening to something on the other side.

Drywall is one thing – an inch thick, run through like a marathon banner. This is a good foot.

"I could explode." A contemplative moment, and then a giggle that flirts with hysteria. "Or I could disprove the Pauli exclusion principle."

And the wall feels very hard. Very solid, very cool, the dust of the red brick nibbling at the cream of her cheek. But she can't stand like this for much longer, otherwise people really are going to take notice of a crazy girl who was talking to herself before and now seems to be listening to a

Her palms slap the pavement and her chest – devoid of any sort of fat cushion – slams into the concrete; her knees take the brunt of it and she can feel the skin grate off of them under her jeans. She remains, dazed.

_Holy crap._

She pushes herself up to all fours, looks behind her.

The brick wall stands, high and wide, and to the passerby, wholly untouched.

"Holy crap."

She scrambles up, tries to look nonchalant, but there's nothing to worry about – no one is looking. Rent-a-cop is still fiddling with his nails. So she saunters like she belongs across the stretch of empty parking places and circles around to the front of the buses, checking each of their digital destination plates – New York, New York, number 14. She ducks around to the back of the bus's body, deftly avoiding the driver who stands outside, helping passengers with their luggage.

The second time is easier. She presses her hand against the cool metal of the bus's finish, and with a screwed-up expression of concentration, the cold metal suddenly takes the consistency of – thick air? Water, maybe, only she can't feel it at all; there's only a buzzing, an itching, a slight unpleasant tingling as she pushes into the bus, suddenly shoulder-deep. And it feels a lot like swimming, at least in action, as she drags herself up through plastic and metal works like a ghost, and she flattens her hands against the floor of the bus that suddenly becomes gritty and pulls up, like she's lifting herself up from the depths of a swimming pool. Her legs come, though it's like dragging them through molasses.

And then she's inside of the bus, sitting on the black rubberized middle path, looking at the speckled-blue fabric of the seats. Scrambling up gracelessly, she plops into a seat and hunkers down as the doors come open with a hydraulic hiss, and people start filtering in. After a few minutes she sits up more fully and no one seems to pay her any mind. Her absent worry that the bus would be full goes unheeded and they, after an agonizing ten minutes, start-out, half-full, for the big apple.

For the first time, as they pull away from the curb in an impossibly wide, graceful turn, Kitty wonders what she's gotten herself into.

* * *

><p>"They've come back." His father's pace is made with mechanized precision across the gleaming tile, then back again, in a line consistent enough to be a unit of measurement. Not that he's worried, no – his father's face is as always stoic and uncompromising, demanding answers if only for the sake of brevity; his father places no stock in sympathy or truth. <em>Time, <em>he often tells Warren, when the silence that prowls the half-mile stretch of dinner table between them seems ready to strike, _is the most valuable and most wasted resource of all. Never forget that, and your empire will be as Constantine's was to Caesar's. _

_ Of course, _he had taken to muttering in reply, since arguing with his father over historical schematics had proven the epitome of time wasted – perhaps proving that he had internalized the moral emphasized. After realizing this, in retribution, he had flown to their cottage in Aspen and spent eight straight days binging on gold-flecked champagne and lobster pâté, all the while enjoying the enthusiastic company of Aspen's finest young dancers and artists, whose names he can't recall. He thinks of those days fondly in moments like this, pulling his shirt up over the grotesque little skin-spurs protruding from his back like uncooked chicken wings, and prays to God that one of those girls will show up someday with a little bastard, and will take half of everything he's got. At least a billion dollars, for sure, and equal weight in bitterness and misery, if he's lucky.

The poor doctor – the third they've been to, after lump-sum silence settlements from the others who were "incompetent" and worse – looks ready to vomit up his own heart and eat it. He pushes up his little glasses and makes a show of flipping through a chart that has only perfunctory notes expanding upon the diagnosis from a doctor nearly a year gone.

"Ah, well, tests have shown that the growths don't seem to be malignant—"

"And yet they _keep coming_ _back. _Isn't the very definition of a malignant tumor one that continues to grow uncontrollably? You people have cut the damn things out three times already!"

"Ah, well, I can send for new tests if you insist, though I expect the results will be the same—"

"I am not going through chemotherapy." Warren states flatly as he finishes buttoning up his shirt. Strangely enough, these two particular little tumors seem to be at his very beck and call, and lie flat and still against his back when he's clothed. It's only when the clothes come off that they feel the need to stretch their grotesque little masses. Not that the girls in Aspen had minded, after that first initial shock . . . "I refuse to lose my hair. If my father's pre-hair plug state is an indication, I will look like a complete twat bald."

"Watch your mouth."

"Oh, there's no need for that, Mr. Worthington –" this directed at Warren, with a nervous titter, " – I believe that this is not a tumor at all, but perhaps a particularly stubborn Cornu Cutaneum, or perhaps Proteus Syndrome in its infant state. Further testing should illuminate the exact cause. In the meantime, I will schedule you for another surgery to remove the growths . . ."

"Fine, fine." Warren Worthington Jr. strokes his own hair somewhat self-consciously while waving at Warren III to hurry up with a familiar circular motion. Warren immediately forgets how to tie his shoes. "Get in touch with my secretary; I believe he has an opening sometime after the tenth of next month. Warren, please, time is of the essence, the engagement that we're going to be late for is crucial. A name is nothing if you don't have the right connections—"

"—and _insert name here_ serves as an unmissable opportunity to begin developing my network of thieves, backstabbers, whores and charlatans. Is this one a political or social call?" Without waiting for an answer, Warren turns his head to the small doctor, who startles as if Warren's arctic blue stare is instead a cattle prod.

"Those diseases you mentioned before. Can they be cured?"

"Oh, well, the Cornu Cutaneum can often just be excised, though your case may require some radiation treatment . . ." and uneasy smile, "though . . . ah, well . . . in the case of Proteus Syndrome, there has been some . . . well,_ a_ case where it has been successfully treated with drug therapy . . ."

"So no." Warren jumps down from the examination table with mercurial light-footedness, turns, and grins at the iron, dyspeptic face of his father, knowing that in his beauty and wealth he is the portrait of his father as a young man, and knowing that the fact must kill the older man. Warren Worthington III, who, as an upgraded model, is supposed to be the better of his predecessors, the torchbearer of their collective immortality.

"Congratulations father. Your only heir is a malformed freak. Let's go spread the good news."

* * *

><p>Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of blindness is the complete negation of time as a physical force. Scott Summers not only does not know what hour it is, but even what day of the week. Before, he had relied on a speaking watch to tell him the hour, but it, like all of his other personal effects, has disappeared. The crispness of coming night or the rising warmth of the morning are both absent, replaced by processed, alcohol-tinged air, which hisses into the room from overhead.<p>

"Open yuir mouth, please."

Thin paper crackles under his fingertips. He's nearly naked, sitting on an upraised table, his feet curled together, trying not to shiver while strange hands wander over his goose-pimpled flesh. The cold head of a stethoscope skates over his back, his chest, and the woman with the unplaceable brogue commands him in lilting tones to breathe.

"Verra good."

They had traveled first by car, and its lulling vibration over the road (and the crippling silence between its passengers) had dragged him, despite his best efforts, into sleep. He had awoken to a rough jostling as he was herded into what he can only guess was a small plane; its intense sensations of ascent and descent had left him tense, sweating, and clutching the armrests so hard one of his fingernails had chipped. He doesn't even know if they're in the United States any more. He's asked a thousand questions but the woman with the accent has demurred on them all, patting his hands with her latex, dusty gloves and assuring him that everything will be answered soon, soon.

He doesn't want to trust her. Despite the fact that his schooling has been spotty at best (few foster parents had the time or energy to enroll him in a proper school for the blind, and public schools, for the most part, were ill-equipped to handle him) he has always considered himself well ahead of the curve. It had occurred to him, shortly after he and his sparse luggage were packed into the pine-scented silence of the SUV, that he may have folded his cards before even seeing his hand. He didn't know any of their names, after all, or even what organization or agency they were from (if they were from the government at all) . . .

Not to mention that if he were to disappear, no one would come looking.

So he doesn't want to trust her. Only her hair smells like coconut, and every time she gives him an injection or draws blood (which has happened so often that, by now, he's amazed he has any blood left) she croons to him in that wonderful dialect that he can't comprehend half the time, and, after, cups the back of his neck with her gloved hand and tells him that he's a "brave lad."

Like a mother would do.

"What's his name? The man that brought me here?"

"Ye can call him the professor."

"Just the professor?"

"Aye. To be honest, I dannae even know his real name. But I've been workin' here fer a year and it would be embarassin' to ask now, aye?"

He senses that she's not being entirely truthful.

"Jump on down fer me."

She takes his hand and walks him down a cold metal hallway. He's dressed in a flimsy hospital gown (though he doesn't think they're in a hospital, there's no smell of sickness, no coughing, no morbid heart-beeps) and the chill of the place creeps up through his bare feet, invades the marrow of his bones.

Turns, turns, so many he loses track of their path. The room they eventually enter is crowded with mechanized hums and clicks. He can almost feel the tension of the machinery as she directs him to lie down and stay still, as he slides with a mechanical whirr into some burrow, as something settles around his head and begins to spin within the claustrophobic confines of a womb that feels like metal and plastic.

"Are there more like me?" He calls after a lonely minute.

An intercom blips. "Please try verra hard not to move, Mr. Summers."

"Are there?"

An almost contemplative silence, and the intercom blips again. He can hear her smile. "Aye," she says quietly, "aye, more than ye ken."

Another cold hallway he shuffles down, another cold room that he's lead to, though this time there are more people, ones who attach hard things to his head with sticky adhesive. Then they leave, and he stands alone and unsure. He doesn't know her name, either, or he would call for her.

The voice that comes over this intercom is male, as hard as old grease. "Mr. Summers, there's a pressure plate in front of you that we would like to use to get a few readings. When you're directed, please remove the medical bandage and look straight ahead with your eyes open."

"I'll destroy it."

It's a moment before the intercom triggers again, and when it does, it catches the end of a few low chuckles. "Don't worry about that Mr. Summers. Just go ahead and remove the bandage."

He sees. It's only for a moment and, as before, it's cast in red, as if blood has run into his eyes. He sees, jus for an instant, a brief vision of a mundane room that strikes him as powerfully as the image of a saint would a God-fearing man. _There is a world_, he thinks, as the crimson beam punches out of his eyes and decimates the metal plate ten feet in front of him. _There is a world_, he thinks as the beam continues through the wall behind the plate, as smoldering pieces of metal bury themselves in the wall and impale themselves in the floor at his feet, _and here I am, in it._

Breathless: "That's enough now, Mr. Summers. Thank you."

And he returns to darkness.

* * *

><p>Okay, so I know I know some characters may seem a little OOC (especially Angel in this chapter), but one of the things I'm aiming to do in this story is explore how these characters might have turned out without Xavier's influence, as well as a burgeoning public knowledge of mutants. How these guys might have turned out in our real and modern society, if you will – not only how their personalities might have differed, but how their relationships . . . oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself. :3<p>

Reviews are always appreciated!


	6. Chapter 6

Hmm, well, that certainly took longer than expected. Thanks for your patience, and to all those who have reviewed!

As always, all involved characters are the property of their respective creators, and all fall under the copyright of Marvel. No infringement is intended.

* * *

><p>Chapter 6<p>

* * *

><p>They are in the wrong part of the hospital. Dr. Reyes steers Val and Sean from one wing to the other, from the shrill, horrible silence of the burn ward to the hospital's newest building. Gurneys full of sickness become less frequent, as do the doddering elderly venturing like wounded animals out from their dens; the walls became increasingly well-painted, the floors polished to a Spartan gleam, and the spaces between each patient door go from close as chain links to far enough to hold an echo. Not what Val would have expected, given the circumstances, the anonymity of the lone man who had survived the burning boxcar.<p>

Neither are the suits expected, as Dr. Reyes opens the desired door into a hospital room bigger than Val's first apartment. A full half dozen men are strung across the expansive room's foyer like a murder of crows on a telephone wire. They aren't attorneys – they don't have that saccharine, skulking look of high-class salesmen; their collars are too crisp, their cuts too clean. Watching, their eyes are fortified by concrete barriers only barely metaphorical. Politicians, then, or criminals. Probably both.

They nod at Dr. Reyes and her lips bastardize a smile. As one, they look to Val and Sean.

"May we see your credentials, please." It's not a question. Usually a quick flip satisfies, but these men take both her and Sean's badges and read them carefully, eyes flickering between the photos and the modelling faces as they're passed down the wire. Their thoroughness is almost offensive; Val half expects them to bite the badges to check their brass.

"Thank you." It's a different man that speaks each time, but the tone and intent is the same. Over the fence of their black-clad shoulders she has only caught the briefest glances of the patient, who lays unspeaking and unmoving on a slightly inclined hospital bed, his dour eyes turned to the dour sky outside. "I am sorry, but Mr. Yoshida is not accepting visitors at this time."

"Good t'ing we aren't visitors, then." Sean doesn't even crack a smile, and makes to push past them. They, in turn, converge in an impassable black wall.

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Yoshida—"

"Let them through." The voice holds more annoyance than illness. The line of men glance fleetingly over their shoulders.

"Sir?"

He barks something in what Val thinks is probably Japanese. They part. Dr. Reyes touches Val's arm, drawing her attention. "He's still in a relatively fragile state, so no more than a few minutes of questioning. Try not to stress him."

"Thank you, Dr. Reyes." A hint of a real smile, and Dr. Reyes heads out with a final withering glance towards the suited men.

"And don't let these jokers push you around."

Sean strides to the bedside. Val follows lackadaisically, eyes on her phone where she is attempting to Google various spellings of their patient's name – people are always more cooperative if they think they're adding to a cop's knowledge rather than providing it, and "Who the hell are you?" probably isn't the best way to start. At the same time, her peripheral vision is registering that this hospital room is complete with a 52" TV and a minibar, and couches that are probably real leather. Which narrows down the possibilities of which Wikipedia Yoshida this might be.

"Shiro Yoshida, son of United Nations Ambassador Saburo Yoshida." She says this just as Sean has opened his mouth; he closes it, shoots her an approving glance as she tucks her phone into her back pocket. "You want to tell us how someone like you ends up smuggled into the country in a boxcar with a dozen other people, all of whom end up burned to death?" That doesn't garner a similar glance, but Val ignores it.

_And why you aren't hurt? _Because she had expected horror. She expected a survivor covered in burn blisters like boils from the Old Testament. She expected screaming, inconsolable pain – it seemed appropriate, somehow, considering how the others had died. But he's not so much as scratched. Maybe early-twenties, handsome, hollow-eyed and pale faced, he might have been nursing a hangover if the atmosphere had been different.

His mouth twitches vainly at his own name but he doesn't acknowledge either of them; he remains looking out onto the grey parking lot, the gleaming bodies of idle cars.

"I want to go home." He says finally, and despite the chilliness of his tone it comes off almost childish. "Your government is stalling me because I cannot prove my identity, and I don't have the patience for bureaucratic wrangling. Neither does my father. So send me home."

"I'm afraid we don't have much say in that—"

"Then get out."

"- but we need to know what happened in there. Was it an explosion? A gas leak?" Only it couldn't be, because the forensic guys hadn't found any accelerants, and no conclusive point of origin for the flames. The gas spectrometer hadn't picked up any errant fumes. Val would have suggest spontaneous human combustion if she had been in a better mood.

But Shiro is done talking. "I need to rest."

A beat, two, of tense silence. Shiro still refuses to glance in their direction, lost in some other place beyond the gray outside.

"Give us a moment, would ye Val?" Sean says finally, and tips his head towards the door. "An' take the goons wit' you."

At this, Shiro finally turns, and his and Sean's stares meet. Val retreats only hesitatingly, because she doesn't know Sean all that well, and doesn't know how much of a fan of 80's cop shows he is. But she goes, and equally hesitantly, the line of men follow her after another sharp bark from Shiro.

Sean listens for the door to close. When he hears the quiet click, he drags a chair up to the bedside, sits in it backwards, cradling the chair back between his knees.

"I t'ink I know what yer going through."

Shiro remains silent for one moment, and then licks his lips. "Do you know what part of the human body catches fire first, detective?" Sean doesn't answer. "Hair. When people first catch on fire, they look like your Christian angels, their heads radiating a halo of blazing white." A tear slips down his cheek, and he turns his face to hide it. "I don't have any answers for you. Now get out."

Sean, in response, reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a single drinking glass, taking a moment to shine it on the breast of his shirt. And then he holds it up to his lips, parting them gently.

Shiro watches from the corner of his eye.

Though no audible sound emerges, for miles around, dogs slink under beds or blankets and scratch at their ears with their paws. Others howl endlessly, aimlessly at some unseen attack.

Shiro watches. The glass trembles ever so slightly, so close to Sean's gently parted lips.

And then it shatters with such violence Shiro flinches. Pieces of glass fly onto the bedspread, strike the floor with a gentle tinkling sound. As the men in black burst back into the room at the sound, Sean simply sets the glass's jagged base onto the bedside table, and drops his card into it as he stands.

"Call me if ye want to have a chat." He says, and leaves the room, glass crunching under his shoes as he goes.

* * *

><p><em>My dear family,<em>

_ I am sorry that I could not write you sooner, but I want to assure you that I am doing well. I am living in the city now._

Piotr knows that his people are not known for their joviality or charisma; that, through the ages, it has been sorrow that has defined the Russian people from their peers. But in this desolate place – this grey place of soulless skyscrapers and grimy streets of cracked concrete, of broken plastic signs and meaningless graffiti – it seems to him the people are burdened by a special sort of suffering, one that cuts deep grooves into their faces, turns their eyes perpetually downcast.

_Tell Ilyana that the apartment they have given me is bigger than our entire home! Perhaps soon she will be able to come and visit me._

Hidden in old soviet-block housing, with gray corridors and concrete walls, his apartment is sparsely furnished and cold. The first thing Piotr does is hang bright blue curtains, both to chase in some life and to block out the sight of the courtyard below, which is filled with the rusted remains of old bicycles and broken children's toys, hidden like Easter eggs amongst the tangles of weeds. On the third day of his living there, Piotr finds a crushed cigarette butt in the doorway of his small kitchen. They are watching him, and they want him to know it.

_Please do not be worried that I will come to harm. I am acting as the personal guard of some important individuals. It sounds like much more than it is. Mostly I just wait around._

"You should not try and listen in, comrade." Now, Piotr glances at the man adjacent to him, the other sentinel guarding the closed door – they both stand stiffly, like prison guards, terribly incongruent in this dingy little hotel. The paint on the walls is cracked and flaking, the brass doorknobs and door numbers bruised with tarnish. A worn path cuts down the center of the carpeted hallway, beaten there by hundreds, if not thousands of feet. It is like the dirt trails generations of elk leave in the underbrush in the hills of home.

Only, it's not like that at all.

Arkady Gregorivich is grinning at Piotr. His teeth are sharp, cancer yellow. "They do not like us to know too much."

"Then what are we here for?" Piotr replies tiredly.

"You will know soon enough." Piotr is an artist, at heart, and despite his colorless surroundings those instincts remain: upon meeting Arkady, his first impulse was to reduce him to tones, to define him by the contrast of his bone white skin to world around him.

Only that's not right either. Because this strange, massive man is not the white of anything so noble as a bone. He is the sallow white of a corpse dredged from a riverbed, the white of a tapeworm that has never seen the sun. Even his blonde hair – close shaven, gleaming on his ashy skull like frost – is a sickly, unnatural shade. His eyes are so bloodshot it makes Piotr sick to look into them. In his black suit and blood red tie, this man looks like a cadaver that has wandered away from his own wake. And Piotr wonders what could possibly bring his "employers" to pair him with such a macabre creature, who must either be near death or in some hideous final stage of an appalling disease.

The smile is disconcerting, to say the least, and Piotr tries to ignore it, to focus, despite the other man's warnings, on the murmuring in the closed room behind him, the crackling of papers, the shuffling of feet, all the while pulling at his own tie. They had taken him to a tailor – a small, nervous man with glasses thick enough to light fires – and had him fitted for a suit that, no matter how perfectly cut and stitched, feels unnatural.

Through the wall, the voices raise an octave, though they remain civil.

"You are from Siberia?" Arkady continues, idly lighting a match. The sound of its combustion, the pungent smell of phosphorous, are acidic in the stale air. Arkady watches it blacken and burn, then drops it smouldering to the carpet. In the other room, a chair groans as the weight on it shifts.

"Yes. Ust-Ordynski."

"I could tell from your accent. I had some work in Siberia, some years ago." Another match lit, burned, dropped. Another chair sighs against the floor as it is pushed back. The sound of a briefcase snapping closed.

"Work?" Piotr only realizes after he's said it that he doesn't really want to know. That rictus grin returns to the Arkady's ashen face.

"Perhaps when we know one another better, comrade, I will tell you all about it."

It happens very quickly; the squeal of table legs against the floor, a shout: one, two, three quick pops of gunfire. Piotr clenches one hand into fist that is steel before he knows it; he brings it against the door that shatters into so many splinters. Metal races up his arm, his chest, his face, and it's very nearly like being submerged; the bullets that ricochet off his body feel like nothing more than thrown pebbles, while the resulting screams of rage and fear become detached, distant. Piotr reaches forward to a man who is holding a Kalashnikov and squeezes the muzzle closed with one hand.

"Stop." He feels the heat of the metal barrel only distantly, like touching an oven turned off hours before. The man, unwisely, tries to continue firing and the gun blows up in his face. Little pieces of shrapnel ping against Piotr's skin as the man falls to his knees, howling and holding his bloody eyes.

_They treat me well, and __I am making good money. I will have father's debt paid in no time. Please send me Ilyana's size so I can buy her some new dresses. I know that the other girls at school tease her because of her old ones._

Pitor grabs the neck of a second gun-waving man, and the gunfire stops.

"Put it down."

"Please don't kill me." The man burbles, greasy tears sliding down his face. The pistol clatters to the floor. "Oh God, please don't kill me."

"Arkady, that's enough." Piotr turns to see his employer getting up from the floor, dusting off his pupil-black suit, unharmed despite the blood that spatters his face; his living associates scramble to help him to his feet. Two men lie dead on the floor; three more have their hands up. Stacks of colorful rubles lie in fans where they have spilled from the briefcase holding them, their tips dipped in blood. Piotr drops the weeping man, turns, and staggers.

He had wondered why his employers' response to his metal form were so nonchalant. It had never occurred to him that they might have another beast, and that this one's curse would be far more monstrous than Piotr's own. Because Arkady is crouched over a second gunman, this one wrapped in a nest of thick metal cables. Piotr wonders absently Arkady has gotten the cables from, thinks that Arkady is suffocating the gunman with them, somehow, because the man, tangled, has gone Arkady's same grotesque whey color and is gasping, the veins in his face swollen and corpse-violet.

Until he sees that those metal ropes are protruding from Arkady's pale wrists. At the command they begrudgingly retreat, slinking back into Arkady's arms with a fleshy, sucking sound. The gunman's body sags on the floor, unmoving, his empty eyes bulging from their sockets like boiled eggs.

_I hope that I will be home before I receive your reply. Please do not worry for me. Please do not be afraid._

Piotr stumbles back a step, whispers, "What are you?"

Arkady stands from his crouch, and Piotr sees that the man has changed; there is a new light in his eyes, a predatory strength as he flexes his fingers, squeezes his hands into fists. He licks his lips, and grins.

"Me?" Arkady laughs. "My dear Piotr, _we _are the men that God forgot."

When Piotr returns home, he spies the letter on the lonely plane of his desk, takes it in hand and tears it to pieces.

He has never been very good with words.

* * *

><p>It's the smell that drags her up from the pool of leaden sleep – the rank, acidic stink of sickness and urine and excrement and hot, unwashed bodies. As the fog of pain eases from her eyes her gorge instinctively rises; only iron stubbornness keeps her from contributing to the fetor.<p>

It is dark here, the darkness of a coal mine, the darkness that surely must exist in the absence of space. But she can feel its fullness – the sultry womb-heat of exhaled air, the sweat-slickness of warm flesh, all crowding her with movement, gasps, incantations. She pushes away from them even as that awful heat claps over her aching skull like a _niqab_. In a blind, half-waking panic she stands and falls forward, fumbling through masses of twisting bodies, treading on hands and feet and hair, eliciting startled cries from the whispering quiet, her balance disoriented by a floor that rocks like a sick stomach. She doesn't care, she can't breathe, she has to find –

Emptiness. Ororo falls into a sit, palming the sweat from her brow, trying to pull the hot, sour air in through her cracked lips rather than her nose. Its so foul she can taste it. The floor rocks, and something purrs beneath the warm metal of the floor. Her shoes are gone. She wonders wildly if one of those strange, damp figures stole them. The hair at the side of her head is blood-caked; a tender bulb of skin wails beneath the crust.

A harsh whisper that she doesn't understand: "Don't go near it." And then Ororo hears it, the harsh, muffled breaths that have been a steady heartbeat to the darkness. For a minute, two, she sits, listening to that awful, rasping breathing as her eyes adjust to the small shafts of light that pierce this veritable mine. From the darkness emerges the slightest of shapes, vague figures in the darkness, like reflections in glass. She backs away from them as a few reach forward, until a hard wall of hot metal meets her groping hands. The strength of that metal, the solidness of it, sends her heart into a rabbit's panic and she gropes along it, fingers searching desperately for some rent that might be an escape.

The heavy breathing grows closer, and a swell of murmuring rises at her back. "Don't!"

She finds something, finally. Something soft, something warm under hand – fur. An animal? No, no, surely a fur coat, though in this heat-

"Bitte." The word is muffled, as if by fabric, but is distinctly male. Ororo startles back for a moment, then returns to her blind exploration – an arm, then, and a shirt; a breathing chest and throbbing heartbeat, and here—"Bitte, hilfe."

A chord, a knot. Fabric, rough to the touch – burlap, maybe. Hands other than hers might have fumbled with the knots that fastened the fabric around his neck, but she had spent too much time stealing purses off of strings to be perplexed for long, even in the dark. After a moment she pulls the binding loose, then pulls the cloth bag off the strange man's head.

"Dankeshön." He draws that toxic air into its lungs with a deep, ragged gasp, as if he has come up from a long submersion. "Sie sind ein Engel, Fräulein." He looks up, and smiles.

A collective moan from the crowd. Its eyes are like fire.

Ororo retreats with a violent backwards scuffle, and someone behind her begins praying in high, feverish notes; another begins to sob brokenly. "Nein, nein –" The murmurs are growing louder, more hysterical. His voice cuts above theirs, matching their anxiety; he meets her eyes and he says slowly, "I won't hurt you. Please."

And she stops. The old, unused cogs in her brain begin to shift, to shake off their cobwebs as Ororo methodically translates the words through the old books of memory.

"What are you?" She calls back quietly. The creature's English seems to have temporarily stunned the mass of bodies into silence. Those fiery eyes flicker, and he says weakly, "I don't know."

"My name is Kurt." He adds. Then, "I'm German."

It's a fool's errand, maybe, but there's a nakedness in the words that sends her daring closer in the same blind crawl. Those glowing eyes are somehow deeply kind and equally frightened, and the old adage comes upon her, drifting up from the black pool of memory

_He's more afraid of you than you are of him, her mother says, as she takes the spider in her dark hands, unafraid, and walks it to the window._

She finds him again and tentatively she reaches out, her finders brushing the soft down of his flesh (fur?), her hands, at least, trying to figure him out. Despite the traces of light he doesn't quite seem to exist but in a pool of darkness . . . except for those eyes, of course. He flinches back, at first, someone not used to being touched, but she can feel the tension under that velvety skin slowly loosen as she herself grows bolder. Neither of them breathes as she finally cups his cheeks in her hands, peering curiously into the yellow, pupil-less eyes, absently feeling the impossible shape of his ears with her fingers.

"Please, my hands—" He ventures, after a moment of silent inspection. Tracing the length of his arms to his back, then to his wrists, she finds raw flesh and more tight knots. "Danke, danke."

"Ororo." She says finally, "my name." She smiles a little, and he returns the gesture just as shyly. He says something, rapid fire, and she shakes her head in confusion, says slowly, "I am sorry. I do not speak for long time."

"It's okay. I learned from watching American movies." His grin widens, though her befuddled expression stays. There are no more noises from the crowd – their softly whispered words are the only thing that cut the tension silence – but the space around them has grown exponentially wider. Those yellow eyes flicker nervously. "You aren't afraid of me?"

Another long pause as she works through the words. "In my country . . . my eyes, my hair." She struggles to dredge up terms to fit memories. "They spit at me, sometimes."

"I see." A strand of hair is pushed away from her eyes, and she recoils, not seeing the hand that moves it. "Beautiful, but very strange. White hair, blue eyes . . . You're bleeding. Are you alright?"

She meticulously processes the words, and then falters. Her previous panic had been assuaged by the presence of this strange creature, but now, the crushing quality of the darkness reasserts itself in her mind; she can taste the stagnancy in the exhaled air. The gentle oscillation – one she had quickly accustomed to – connects with some genetic memory and she understands, quite suddenly, that they are on a ship. "Can you see?" She croaks.

"Yes." She can feel him moving, and reaches out to steady herself, wraps her fingers around the down of his arm.

"Where are we?"

A long silence. "I'm not sure. It looks like a boxcar."

It takes her a moment to connect the word with a mental image, and when she does, the breath goes out of her in one great gasp. "Can we go out?" Almost imperceptibly, the few shafts of light that penetrate through the bullet-sized holes in the metal walls darken. A boxcar – she looks through to darkness to the vague images of bodies crowded against the far wall, the whites of their eyes gleaming wetly in the darkness. How many people are here? "Please?"

"I don't think so, we're just going to have to wait until - Fräulein?" It starts slowly. Her throat constricts as sweat springs to her brow; her breath whistles in and out of her body as her breath shallows, quickens. Her hands raise to tangle in her hair. "Are you alright?" She curls into herself, her head between her knees, gasping, gasping. Beneath them, the floor gives a hard pitch. The wind lets out a lonely howl.

"No air."

"It's alright, Fräulein –" The boxcar is almost totally black now, as the weak light filtering in from outside dims. "Please don't panic." His voice is turned away from her, as if he's looking up.

"No air. No air, I –"

A gunshot of thunder goes off overhead. She feels him jump.

Tears pour out of her eyes. She should have known, down here in the dark, there's never any air in the dark. She is choking on the rancid air that even now is running out, divided between her and that mass of writhing bodies and there can never possibly be enough – she gasps, she gasps, and a volley of rain hits the roof of the boxcar with the suddenness and severity of death itself. The wind screams.

"Please, Fräulein, clam yourself –" Its, _his_ strange hands are on her shoulders, his tone soothing but alarmed, "You're going to faint if you—"

Another cannon blast of thunder directly overhead. Kurt's hands bite into her shoulders. "I cannot breathe!" She screams. The once near-imperceptible rocking of the car has become a fever pitch, and the small shafts of air filtering in through gasp in the ceiling have disappeared; the darkness is absolute. The tapping of rain has become a machinegun rattle of hail. Their silent hell has become a cacophony, an uproar of wild violence and screaming prayers and weeping.

"Put your arms around my neck." He shouts it into her ear but she doesn't respond, rocking with the boat's suicidal listing, her empty eyes pouring tears. He pulls her hands away from where they're cutting trenches into her face and drags her up to her feet, then does it for her, wrapping her arms around the soft velvet of his neck as he pulls her to him; she grips him as if he's the only thing holding her to the world, her back, her chest heaving against him as he wraps what she thinks is his arm around her waist. The ground disappears beneath her feet, even as the world beneath them rolls and shudders, and the Gods groan.

"Breathe." Her face buried in his neck she doesn't hear him at first, not over the sound of her own palpitating heart, her tortured gasping. "There's an air vent right here. Breathe, liebchen."

And she can't see any light through it, no, but she can feel the gentle, cold touch of the sea-salt air against her face; she looks up and presses her face against the metal grate, and gulps down a mouthful of clean air.

She doesn't know how long they stay there, but the rolling of the sea eventually calms into a gentle rock; the rain slows into a soft patter, the light once again begins to cut soft shafts through the tiny gaps in the walls. The thunder abates. She remains, her face pressed up against the sour metal, pulling deep breaths into her body.

"Was that you, liebchen?" He asks her once her pitching breaths have abated, her tears subsided. His eyes are wide, "Was that –?"

It was only then that she sees he is clinging to the wall, suspending them twelve feet above the ground.

* * *

><p>Review! Reviewing makes me happy, and happiness makes me update! :D<p> 


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